Community News
STEM IN QUEENS SCHOOLS
Math for America introduces 21 Queens-based STEM
teachers into 2019 class
BY ANGÉLICA ACEVEDO
Math for America
(MƒA), an organi-zation
committed
to helping accom-plished
STEM
teachers continue
to thrive, recently welcomed 21 new
“master teachers” into its 2019 class
— and they’re all teaching in Queens.
John Ewing, president of MƒA, said
that the “very selective” four-year fellow-ship
is designed to provide outstanding
K-12 teachers the opportunity to interact
with fellow educators as well as give
them enriching workshops.
But the organization’s most important
mission is to keep these teachers in
the classroom.
“In addition to keeping these really
great teachers teaching, we’re trying to
change what teaching feels like to show
that it’s much more than just standing in
front of the classroom — but that it’s a
real profession, that it’s respected and
that it’s fun,” Ewing said.
And in order to foster their fellows’
passion for teaching, they also provide
them with a yearly $15,000 stipend.
The New York City-based organization,
which is funded by the Simmons Founda-tion,
has a total of 1,016 members from
public schools across the five boroughs —
with 144 of those being teachers from 63
different schools in the “World’s Borough.”
One of the newest members of
their community is Andrew Rodriguez,
a seventh-grade math teacher at Long
Island City’s Hunters Point Community
Middle School.
The Texas native who always wanted
to teach in a big city — “and it doesn’t
get any bigger than New York,” Rodri-guez
said — believes that MƒA’s mission
aligns perfectly with his own core values
as a teacher.
“It’s my job to help students problem
solve and to help them become a good
person,” Rodriguez said. “So I want these
things that I’m learning with MƒA and the
choices that I have in my professional
development modules to reflect that.”
Rodriguez began his term in Septem-ber,
and is currently taking two work-shops
out of the 400 that the fellowship
offers this fall. He began with one that
focuses on effectively giving his stu-dents
feedback, and another group on
compassion and fatigue, in which he’s
“learning how to take care of myself so
that I can take care of my kids.”
The alumnus of Texas State Univer-sity
in Saint Marcos and Relay Graduate
School of Education in New York City
said that the $15,000 stipend is an
added bonus.
“I mean, it’s fantastic,” he said. “I
can use that to improve things in my
classroom. I can use that to just make
sure that I have everything that I need
professionally. I can use that to also go
to places and learn about other avenues
of education. So, that really takes away
a lot of the additional stress that you
might have as a classroom teacher, and
it gives you a little extra buffer that you
could use to really improve yourself.”
Because of all that the program has to
offer, Rodriguez thinks the “rigorous” ap-plication
and interviewing process is fair.
Ewing explained that the interview
process alone involves a “morning and a
half of an afternoon’s” worth of presenta-tions,
group discussions and evaluations
from MƒA representatives.
“I think that it’s that way for a reason,
because it wants to make sure that
teachers are really passionate about
learning, first and foremost,” Rodriguez
said. “And that passion for learning gets
pushed in to your classroom.”
Ewing, a mathematician who was a
professor at Indiana University for 25 years
24 OCTOBER 2019 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
prior to becoming the president of MƒA,
hopes that the program will grow from it’s
New York City origins in the near future.
He talked about previous efforts to
create a similar program in Connecticut
that didn’t work out in the end, and
their latest “mini-MƒA” project in New
Jersey. Ewing also mentioned how they
successfully convinced New York state
to create a program modeled on theirs.
“It’s called the New York State Mas-ter
Teacher Program (NYSMTP) and
it’s funded by the state,” he said. “It’s
grown a lot.”
With 10 percent of the entire MƒA com-munity
representing the city’s STEM teach-ing
population, both Ewing and Rodriguez
believe that, in the end, it’s the students
who will benefit the most in the long run.
When addressing the common mis-conception
that math may be too hard
to understand, Rodriguez said that
he combats this “stigma” by having a
“growth mindset” in his own classroom
and shows his students that even if
they’re not good at one problem, they
might be able to solve another.
“I think it’s very important that as educa-tors
we make sure that we give those kids
successes and we give them an opportunity
to succeed so that they can see that their
persistence and their grit will push beyond
that misunderstanding, and actually get
them to where they want to be,“ he said.
Below, see the full list of MFA’s new
members of the Queens teacher cohort.
• Gabriela Aldave Jordan, Aviation Career
& Technical Education High School
• Michael Capobianco, Thomas A. Edison Ca-reer
and Technical Education High School
• Melissa Fernandez, John Adams High
School
• Sara Gottlieb, P.S. 165 Edith K. Bergtraum
• Helen Haritos, Bayside High School
• Estefania Hereira, Flushing Interna-tional
High School
• Dawoun Jyung, Metropolitan Expe-ditionary
Learning School
• Despina Kaneris, Queens High
School for Language Studies
• Milly Linares, I.S. 093 Ridgewood
• Taryn Martinez, Hunters Point Com-munity
Middle School
• Marisa Miller, Forest Hills High School
• Oluseyi Okuneye, Metropolitan Ex-peditionary
Learning School
• Angela Oldenburg, World Journalism
Preparatory
• Luna Ramirez, Information Technol-ogy
High School
• Andrew Rodriguez, Hunters Point
Community Middle School
• Michelle Sugrim, Business Technol-ogy
Early College High School
• Erica Tunick, Forte Preparatory Acad-emy
Charter School
• Christian VanDeurs, World Journalism
Preparatory
• Quratul Waqas, I.S. 230
• Jessica White, Scholars’ Academy
• Kaitlyn Zwicke, Queens High School for
Information, Research, and Technology
Math for America
Math for America recently welcomed 21 new
Queens teachers into their four-year fellowship
/www.qns.com
/www.qns.com
