new teacher profiles
Following her ‘dream of making good’
Nov 20, 2008 1:50 PM
“There’s nothing better than seeing kids respond to a teacher who cares,” says Sara Panag, special education teacher at Goldstein HS for the Sciences in Brooklyn — by way of Hong Kong.
The culture shock that hit Sara Panag when she emigrated from Hong Kong to America at 18 wasn’t a matter of East vs. West, but about moving from a dynamic city to the suburbs surrounding Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
New York City was more her style. In 1999, when a professor nominated her for an internship as an editor at McGraw-Hill, she was off like a shot.
“That was the purpose of coming here: the immigrant dream of making good,” Panag says.
Making good in corporate America was gratifying, but being a special education teacher for the past three years at Goldstein HS for the Sciences in Brooklyn has been much better.
“The social-justice side of me really wanted to come out,” says the teaching fellow, who was a community volunteer as a young student and whose heroine was news correspondent Christine Amanpour.
Panag thought of journalism as “an aspect of social justice — get the news to the people, go get answers, be the gatekeeper.”
But journalism wasn’t in the cards for her in Hong Kong’s regimented school system, where students are tracked from 8th grade and careers are more or less handed out like edicts.
Panag was destined for either the hard sciences or the arts and sciences.
“I did have an interest in the arts and sciences, but I thought that that wasn’t for smart people. What did I know when I was 12 or 13?” she says, explaining that a student’s performance in the O-levels, or Ordinary levels, under Hong Kong’s British-style school system, is “your do-or-die.”
It determines which of the city’s four colleges a student will attend, “and if you don’t pass, that’s it, unless you go to Australia or some other country,” Panag says.
Even more difficult for Panag than acclimating to suburban life was adjusting to the array of academic choices at an American college — and to the fact that she was the one expected to choose among them.
Being left to her own devices was hard, she adds. But there was no way Panag would let it stop her from getting the best out of a highly valued American college education or let down the three women who had her success at heart.
Two were former teachers in Hong Kong, one of whom inspired the young Panag merely by her choice of teaching public school when her master’s degree could have taken her far up the academic career ladder.
The third woman was her mother, who ultimately followed Panag and her brother to America and now lives near her.
“My mother always knew what my homework was, knew what I was doing in school, was very, very involved in my education. I never would’ve been able to achieve success without her,” she says.
As a teacher in America, Panag would like to see that level of parental involvement in children’s education. Some of the academic rigor of Hong Kong schools would be good, too, without the intense pressure that is counterproductive.
More money to schools for resources — especially for computer programs that can help focus students with attention disorders — is also on her wish list.
And what suits her just fine about teaching in New York City?
“The kids,” she says. She loves the diversity of the city’s children and its schools.
“And there’s nothing better than seeing kids respond to a teacher who cares,” she says. “In Hong Kong, the teachers all had little desks in this office and you could go in and talk to them. But here, teachers are encouraged to really take children under their wing.”
