Lisa Otsuka is a pillar of the M-A community, known for her dedication and compassion in the classroom. She currently teaches AP Literature and Composition and Emerging Multilingual Learners. Throughout her entire teaching career, Otsuka has taught with kindness and a commitment to her students’ success.
Otsuka grew up in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles. As the oldest of four siblings, with one brother and twin sisters, she spent her days helping her father with displays and organization for his chain of liquor stores.
However, her home life wasn’t always easy as her parents divorced when she was just eight years old. “They had a really contentious divorce, so that was difficult,” Otsuka said. “For a period of time when I was 16, I left home for a little while because my parents were not super present.”
From a young age, Otsuka envisioned a career centered around helping others—especially children—in ways she herself had needed. “I initially wanted to be a doctor or a teacher,” she said. “I used to play with my stuffed animals, and they had to listen to me in class.”
As she grew older Otsuka worked multiple jobs to support herself and eventually attended UC San Diego, where she studied mechanical engineering—driven in part by her mother’s hopes that she would become an engineer.
Everything changed during her junior year of college when she had the chance to study abroad in South Africa during the apartheid era. There, Otsuka taught math and science to seventh and eighth graders, which became a transformative experience. “I knew then that I wanted to teach. That was the moment,” she said. “I was amazed by the world it opened up to me and I realized in those months that I loved teaching. I loved it so much that I didn’t go back to college right away, I stayed there for another six months after.”
When Otsuka returned to UCSD after her time in South Africa, she changed her major to Spanish, literature, and psychology. She also earned a bilingual California teaching credential in 1991 to pursue a career in education. Otsuka was then offered her first teaching job—teaching second grade—in the Ravenswood School District. “At that time, East Palo Alto had the highest murder per capita. I started in ‘93 when they were struggling to find teachers. They offered me a job and I just took it,” she explained.
After several years in the district, Otsuka made the switch to teaching high school. “I started feeling a little disillusioned with the way that district functioned at the time, and I was seeing a lot of my students come over to high school and have a hard time,” Otsuka said. She decided to go back to school, taking a class at Notre Dame to earn a few more credentials. With those in hand, she interviewed at M-A, landed a job teaching English, and has worked here for the past 23 years.
Today, Otsuka teaches a rigorous AP Literature class and makes a conscious effort to help her students navigate the challenges with a positive attitude. “My teaching philosophy is to present rigor with total reachability and kindness,” she said. “I think the metrics that we use in school oftentimes are not the things that matter the most. Quite frankly, they can be very reductive. They also don’t encourage a growth mindset.” Still, Otsuka doesn’t water down her curriculum. She believes her class has to be as hard as a college-level class, but there should always be support for her students to get through it.
“I don’t believe in the one-and-done philosophy, whether it’s one essay or one test. That isn’t really what life tends to reward. We don’t do things perfectly the first time, and students come with a vast variety of abilities, so I appreciate opportunities to gain mastery, which is my focus in the class,” Otsuka said.
Additionally, within her English language development class, Otsuka teaches with true honesty and does her best to connect with all the students. “We read a poem about El Salvador and talked about what students love and don’t love. Having those honest moments with my ELD class is something I cherish,” Otsuka said.
Otsuka’s most cherished memories come from connecting with her students, whether it’s verbal fluency days in ELD class, or playing games in AP Literature like the “Yam Slam” competition. “A lot of times it’s those moments and that part of teaching that really can’t be discounted. It’s all the human moments you have with people,” Otsuka said.
Because of her teaching style—and personality—many students see Otsuka as a nurturing figure at school. “I believe this so for me, that your worth as a person is not defined by your grades, where you live or what you live,” she said. This belief allows Otsuka to connect with her students on a deeper level, even going the extra mile by making rice and bread every day for students to enjoy at lunch.
“I think the conditioning we receive is that worth in the world is something that we earn, which, in my opinion, is not the truth at all. Worth is not something we negotiate with the world around us. It is very much something we carry in silence, worth and belonging come from within. They are not conferred by a university, by a grade, or by a transcript,” Otsuka said.
“If there’s one thing I want my seniors to leave this class with, it’s the idea that we choose our level of consciousness and how we want to live. You can go along with the system and the grades but you don’t have to let that define you. That choice is yours,” she said.
