After teaching for 27 years at the school, P.E. teacher Yuko Aoki will be retiring this June. During her time here, she reinvented herself in a major way, going from a Japanese teacher early in her career to a physical education teacher later in her career.
Born in Japan, Aoki moved to the U.S. for her graduate studies at Indiana State University before beginning her teaching career as a Japanese teacher. Even before moving to the U.S., Aoki had majored in education and dreamed of becoming a teacher.
In 1999, Aoki joined SHS after being referred to the school by a friend. She secured a role as a Japanese teacher and taught six levels of Japanese classes.
Even though Japanese classes are no longer available at SHS, Aoki holds fond memories of the program. One of the highlights of her career was when the Japanese classes at SHS created an encouraging video to send to their sister school in a Japanese city impacted by a tsunami in 2015.
A few years later, as more Chinese classes were introduced and grew in popularity, Japanese class enrollment declined.
Aoki, inspired by her grandfather’s role as a P.E. teacher in Japan, stepped into the role and split her schedule between teaching the two subjects. As Japanese class enrollment continued to decrease, Aoki eventually pivoted to teaching P.E. full-time.
While Aoki had always had the qualifications to teach P.E. from Japan, she was unfamiliar at first with teaching weight room workouts and weightlifting. When a new P.E. curriculum was adopted by SHS in 2009, she had to learn how to lift weights and do pull-ups before she was able to teach these skills to students.
“Because I went through that, I know what [the students] are going through. The experience helped me, and I really enjoy working with high school students who are very motivated and want to get better,” Aoki said.
Now, with over 20 years of experience, Aoki uses her expertise to help out newer P.E. teachers like Liz Alves. When Alves first started teaching at SHS in 2022, she had no knowledge in weightlifting and relied on Aoki’s guidance to learn weightlifting forms and techniques.
In fact, Alves said she attended Aoki’s fourth-period freshman P.E. class and did all of the workouts as though she was a student in order to learn how to teach the course.
“[Aoki] knows more about weightlifting and cues than any of the other P.E. staff do,” Alves said. “She’s really kind, so anything that I ever struggled with or didn’t understand, she spent a lot of time [teaching] me. I didn’t know anything about P.E. and everything I learned about teaching P.E. I learned from Ms. Aoki.”
Alves said she is extremely grateful for all of Aoki’s help and feels honored being able to have worked with Aoki closely for the past four years.
“I feel blessed that I’ve been able to get to know [Aoki] and share an office and classroom with her. She is extremely sweet, extremely gentle, extremely genuine, and she really cares about people,” Alves said, “Aoki has been teaching for 26 years, and she’s taught so many years of Beginning P.E. She is Level Two CrossFit certified and has a lot of expertise in the area of weightlifting, so I do feel like we’re losing a lot of expert skill.”
As a P.E. teacher, Aoki said she constantly aimed to push students out of their comfort zones to achieve greater gains in strength and confidence.
Being able to see students grow and achieve their goals in her class provided extremely rewarding moments for Aoki, who also hoped that students walking away from her class would improve their mindsets to focus on the process rather than the results.
“I hope I push [my students] outside of the box. A lot of students feel like physical things are very difficult, and are scared if they are not athletes,” Aoki said. “A majority of the students I’ve had are not athletes, but if they push the envelope a little bit, they gain quite a lot.”
After her retirement, Aoki said she aspires to travel the world and visit places like Europe and South America. She particularly looks forward to visiting Peru’s Machu Picchu and hiking along trails to see the ancient ruins.
Aoki admits to feeling a little lost without working at the school anymore after teaching for so long. Outside of her immediate family, Aoki has no other relatives in the U.S. It would be bittersweet to part ways with her second “family” at SHS, the only place and community she knows outside of her hometown in Japan.
“[SHS] is just a happy place for me; it is the only world I know. Students are always motivated, they are always working hard. Co-teachers have become my best friends,” Aoki said. “This is the community which made me grow and enjoy my career. I’m looking forward to [retirement], but on the other hand, I’m a little scared.”
