TOUGH LESSONS
Teaching Fellows vets say more prep needed for posts
LIKE MANY driven do-gooders who apply for the New York City Teaching Fellows program, Lisa Cunningham wanted to make a difference in the lives of struggling students.
“I wanted to put a lot of thought into my lessons and be passionate about what I was teaching, but often I was so exhausted,” the 25-year-old Wesleyan University graduate said.
Eventually, the pressures she faced and lack of support in the program made her physically ill and led her to seek therapy.
“I was just falling apart,” said Cunningham, who quit teaching special education students at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in the Bronx after three years. She is now associate director of an afterschool program at School of the Future in Manhattan.
Monday is the deadline to apply to be a NYC Teaching Fellow, a vaunted program begun in 2000 to attract professionals to teach in inner city schools.
Veteran fellows are calling for an overhaul of the program, saying they need to be better prepared to handle some of the lowest-performing kids in the worst schools in the Bronx and Harlem.
A teaching fellow in East Harlem said she would welcome change if it meant future members were better equipped to handle difficult students and unyielding principals, who hold the key to tenure.
The teacher, who requested anonymity because she still works at the school, said kids were out on field trips or in class with substitute teachers when she was supposed to get practical training about three years ago.
Then, when she was placed at her school, “the administration was very unsupportive . . . they didn’t offer any sort of real suggestions to me for how to improve as a teacher,” the 28-year-old said.
Another East Harlem fellow, 33, who declined to give his name, said, “My mentor was supportive, but she didn’t offer me a lot of constructive criticism.”
The program allows newbies to pursue a subsidized master’s degree while they teach in city classrooms and earn a first-year teacher’s salary. They are supposed to get mentors during their first year, coordinated by the school principals.
The educator pipeline now sup- plies more than 8,600 eager teachers in high-needs classrooms across the city, up from 348 teachers in 2000, when the program started.
“I just think that we need to have a serious conversation as a city about the way that we train and support our teachers,” said Cunningham, “because it's really not working.”
DOE officials said they are reviewing the current model, and have rolled out a Spring Appren- ticeship Program for about 140 fellows to start working with students in supervised classrooms earlier. There is a middle school track in the Bronx, revolving around Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s new middleschool initiative, and a special-education track.
“We’re always looking to revise our model and do it in a more practical manner,” said Shuvi Santo, director of teacher recruitment programs. “Models like these make the preparation more intensive and provide more than just theory.”
Renee, who did not want her last name used, was assigned to a notoriously dangerous Bronx middle school where some of her seventh-grade students didn’t know how to read, and the administrators didn’t provide any help. She quit the program after 18 months and is a teacher’s assistant in a city school for at-risk youth.
“Teaching has been a passion of mine for years; it tugs at your heartstrings,” she said wistfully. “You want to do great things.”