Editor's Note: Mr. Steven Bonta used to teach  English, Spanish, and humanities at Shanghai Hongrun Boyuan School. He holds a PhD from Cornell University in linguistics, and is a two-time Fulbright Scholar. After receiving his PhD from Cornell in 2004, he spent eleven years teaching English, Spanish, and linguistics at Penn State University, during which time he also did a considerable amount of field research and publishing in the fields of South Asian languages and semiotics, including a prestigious five-month Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in Sri Lanka. In 2016, he decided to become a high school teacher, and spent two years teaching history and government in Arizona before accepting a position at Shanghai Hongrun Boyuan School and moving to China. He joined Shanghai Hongrun Boyuan School in 2018 with his daughter (who was an SHBS student) but had to leave us in the summer of 2022 due to his daughter attending college in the US. Let's see his farewell words for SHBS members.

I arrived in Shanghai in August 2018. It was my first time in China, and I had accepted a job offer at a brand-new international school, Shanghai Hongrun Boyuan School. I knew little about my new place of employ, other than that it was located on a beautiful, secluded campus in the western part of Shanghai, far from the bustling downtown. Since I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, I appreciated the quiet surroundings of Zhujiajiao and Dadian Lake. But more than that, I quickly fell in love with the school and its energetic, talented student body. As a linguistics PhD from Cornell University, I haven’t often had the opportunity to share with my many university and high school students over the years some of my more obscure academic interests, like comparative historical linguistics and ancient Indo-European languages. But I soon discovered that, among Hongrun Boyuan’s many talented students, one young man had a passion for linguistics and ancient languages, having already taught himself Greek and Latin. I offered to teach him two other classical languages, Sanskrit and Avestan, and he accepted enthusiastically. Thus was born the first of a number of special academic relationships I have had with our students, and for the next two years, I taught Jerry both Sanskrit and Avestan, both of which he learned with uncommon speed and precision.

Since Jerry there have been others, up to the present moment, remarkable young men and women eager to find academic opportunities at Hongrun Boyuan that they would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. In my four years at SHBS, I have watched the school grow from a promising startup into a flourishing, well-known institution. I have watched and shared in the school’s challenges and triumphs during these times of pandemic and international economic upheaval. I have been proud to watch class after class of graduating seniors –each one larger than its predecessor – move into adulthood. It has given me enormous satisfaction to see so many extraordinary and promising young men and women from our SHBS family grow, progress, and graduate into a world where I have no doubt they will make great and resounding contributions to China and to the world at large. I have seen among them future civic leaders, scientists, engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, scholars, and artists. I am grateful for the opportunity to have made some small contribution to their lives. Now, with my own daughter having recently graduated from SHBS and returned to the United States to attend college, I must say a very sad good-bye to what has been without question the best job of my entire adult life. In my four years at SHBS, I have never considered seeking work at any other international school; SHBS has been my home in China, and her people have been my family.

I wish SHBS all the best, and look forward to hearing of your continued growth and success. I love SHBS with all my heart, and commend and recommend this school, its resources, programs, and personnel, to anyone wishing their child to have a truly international education that will set them on the path to success!