Pizza Parties — Why helping others changed my life

by Tony Nguyen

I thought about all the people in the world to write about for women’s history month. I decided that I share a deeply personal story of the person who first inspired me to follow my heart.

I was in fifth grade and it was my final year in elementary school. At this point in my life, I was a quiet and reserved kid in school. I had a lot of classmates who I spent time playing kickball or basketball on the playground but never really developed strong friendships with.

In my school , there was 96% White students and 4% were minorities. It was hard enough being a quiet kid, but being a minority added an additional flavor.

My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Fleming, was always good at making us work together. She held all these fun challenges of how we could help one another and have friendly competition.

We had multiplication timed tests where you had to solve 100 multiplication problems in under 1 minute. (I was able to finish within 30 seconds!). She promised that if everyone in the class could do that under 1 minute, we would earn ourselves a pizza party!

FYI: Pizza parties were the best and they still are!

Little did I know, Mrs. Fleming was creating an environment where all of us were trying to support one another to be the best fifth grade class in our school. I was motivated enough to get everyone to agree on winning a pizza party was totally worth it.