This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Joe Nappi.  He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey.  His parents divorced when he was four, so he was raised both in Tinton Falls (where his mother lived) and Bayonne (where his father lived).  His father was a mechanic for the United States Postal Service.  His mother was a pediatric oncology nurse.  He has one younger brother, and his father remarried when he was nine bringing two stepbrothers and a step sister into his life.  Both of his older stepbrothers did not finish high school and ended up getting Graduate Equivalency Degrees (GEDs).  Although he shared some of the difficulties they faced, Joe did graduate from Bayonne High School in 2000, but was not allowed to participate in commencement.  He then began studying at Ocean County College.  This was convenient as he had moved to stay with his father at this time, and his father had moved to Ocean County to give Joe’s younger brother a better high school experience.  At Ocean County College, Joe paid his own way, which required taking out loans.  He began college pursuing a computer science degree, as coming from a household without a lot of money he felt that this was his best choice to become rich. He liked mathematics and problem solving so it seemed like a good fit. However, he was not enjoying the experience after his first year at OCC.  Then in the beginning of his sophomore year the September 11^th attacks occurred. Joe lost two close family friends in the attack and began re-evaluating his life choices.  He hoped to do something meaningful with his life but was lost as to what that might look like. His girlfriend (now wife) Cristina was starting at Rowan in the College of Education.  She was the one who suggested that he become a teacher. After laughing off the idea and reiterating that he had hated school she said something that changed his view “if you are in charge, it could be whatever you make it.” Intrigued with the idea of “fixing” what he saw as failures in his education career he switched to the Liberal Arts track in the Fall of 2001, which meant that he had to take extra classes.  He began to explore what content he might teach, and he was not impressed with the way history had been presented to him in high school.  After finishing his Associate’s Degree in 2002, he transferred to Rowan.  He graduated from Rowan in December 2004 with a history degree and certification in secondary education. He considered applying for a master’s degree, but his father suffered a major stroke at the end of his Senior year, and he chose to abandon this to move back home to Bayville to help his father while he recovered. In the months after graduating, he took several jobs cooking to earn money to help with the financial needs of his family.  He applied for teaching jobs but was not offered a position. He ended up getting a position at Monmouth Regional High School after the candidate to whom they had offered a position to backed out.  It was a one-year position for a teacher on maternity leave, but it became a permanent position when another teacher in the department became vice principal.  His wife later got a job at the same school as an English Teacher, and they still teach there all these years later.  He began teaching United States history and World history.  Early on in his teaching career, he taught students who were not very motivated, and he focused on building relationships with them.  He had a memorable experience with a student who confided in him that she had no food in her house.  This ended up being a turning point for Joe, and it was the origin of the charitable organization that Joe helped co-found, “Monmouth Helping Its Own.”  The idea was to gather funds from teachers and staff so that money would be available for students struggling with real needs outside of the classroom.  They have now given out over $75,000 to students facing financial needs impacting their ability to function in the classroom, both in direct aid and scholarship awards for students wishing to continue their education after graduation.  Joe hopes that other schools and districts will follow this example as a model for what is possible in assisting students around the state facing similar challenges.  He is most proud of this initiative, but he has had some other great experiences as well.  One of them involved Holocaust education.  Due to the influence of a colleague, he took a summer professional development institute with Facing History and Ourselves that changed his view on what was possible in his classroom and inspired him to pilot a one-month unit on the Holocaust in his US 2 class. He continued to pursue professional development opportunities relating to the Holocaust and in 2015 he was selected for the Alfred Lerner Fellowship with the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous at Columbia University.  He is now a Museum Teacher Fellow with the United States Holocaust Museum and helps train teachers on best practices and resources to teach this difficult subject.  As a result of this work, he got involved with Ken Burns and his company, Florentine Films.  He was part of a national team working on lesson plans which accompanied the release of the film “The US and the Holocaust” and was chosen to write a blog post “10 Tips for Teaching the Holocaust with Confidence” which was PBS Learning Media’s featured blog at the same time that the film was released.  At the end of the school year, he gives his students a choice. They can do a traditional research paper or they can be involved in the “Be the Change” project. A service-learning project that challenges students to find a problem in the world that they feel passionate about, learn more about it and the people working towards resolving it and then designing and implementing an action plan to make a positive contribution towards resolving it.  Due to the great work done by his students in the “Be the Change” project, Joe has gotten a lot of attention and has received a number of awards over the years, including the Dr. Frank Kaplowitz Human Rights Educator of the Year Award from Kean University.  In 2023, he won Teacher of the Year for his school district, his county, and then for the state of New Jersey. 

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I was not the best student beginning in eighth grade.  I began acting out, and my behavior was such that I was not allowed to attend my 8^th grade graduation or my senior prom or my senior graduation.  I began to take academics more seriously in college because my father insisted that I pay my way, arguing fairly that I had done little in high school that indicated I truly wanted to go to college.  September 11^th ended up shifting my studies significantly, and I began to pursue teaching at this point, encouraged by my girlfriend and future wife, Cristina MacPherson.

I had applied to Rowan out of high school, but I had not gotten admitted due to my low high school grade point average.  I decided to go there because of Cristina.  While I wanted to teach at the time that I started at Rowan, I was not certain that I would study history.  That changed after several history classes at Rowan demonstrated that history could be much more than what I had experienced in high school.  The first of these classes was a United States survey class taught by Lee Kress at the Camden campus.  Professor Kress opened my eyes to the fact that history could be about interpretation, debate, and discussion. His class was unlike any other US history course that I had ever taken. I remember the very first day when he began by asking “where do we begin the history of the United States?”  He posed it as a real question instead of just starting with English settlement.  We discussed the history of indigenous peoples and the need to reevaluate the traditional way that history curriculums are organized in high school. 

When I first began studying history at Rowan, we were at the beginning of a paradigm shift in history education.  The old world and approach valued going out and finding information in libraries and archives.  The new world, because of the internet, would come to emphasize more the analyzing of sources and their bias than finding books and articles. Students now need the skills to sift through the mountains of information available to them, these skills are exactly what historical methods offer. Two classes that I remember, in hindsight, helped me so much with building up these new skills were Historical Methods, taught by Dr. Melissa Klapper, and Stalinism, taught by Dr. James Heinzen. They both showed me how to not only find sources but to pierce through misinformation and slanted accounts to determine what was really going on.

Dr. Corinne Blake’s class on the Modern Middle East was incredibly important to me.  I walked into that class trying to understand why people from that part of the world wanted to and did kill friends of mine.  I walked out of that class with a deep appreciation of the diversity and richness of the region and a much more complicated view of this important part of the world. 

Dr. Edward Wang’s class on Chinese Cultural History similarly widened my view of the world.  I remember that his own personal story about the Cultural Revolution really made an impression on me.

I tended to take courses outside of the United States while I was at Rowan in order to learn more about the world, naively thinking that I understood the history of the United States well.  After I began teaching, I realized that I would have benefitted from more US history classes at Rowan too.

I had a great Senior Seminar experience where I wrote a paper on the War of 1812 using archival sources that I inspected at, the Philadelphia Historical Society.  Getting my hands on those authentic sources was a lot of fun for me, and I try to duplicate this experience to a degree today for my students.

Dr. Heinzen talked to me about potentially studying history in graduate school.  However, my father had a stroke in my senior year, and I had to spend time taking care of him.  This development limited my options going forward, and I still think about this “path not taken” some times.  However, I must say that the Rowan faculty during this time were very supportive of me, as they understood my challenge.  Mo Tener in Education not only helped me finish up my student teaching, but he was instrumental in my winning the Ida and Jeff Margolis Medallion for Excellence in Multi-Cultural Education. He saw the work that I put in with a student from India in helping her overcome her limited English proficiency and in finding ways for her to share her experiences with her classmates in a way that felt safe for her.

Everything that I do now, I found at Rowan.  I walked into Rowan with some vague ideas about teaching, and I walked out confident in my path.  The history faculty showed me how history classes could be fun, engaging, and more than what my classes had been in high school.  The College of Education was also important to me, as the experiences I had student teaching confirmed that I would indeed enjoy the classroom experience, something that I am not sure that you can truly gauge until you do it.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100+,” an ongoing collection of memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff that began as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Due to interest in the project, the number of interviewees continues to grow.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 and Project 100+ entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/