new teacher profiles
After all this time ... where he wants to be
Apr 10, 2008 12:52 PM
"Good teaching is sometimes about discovering what needs to get worked on," says Marty Fisher of Bronx Theatre HS.
Sometimes it’s about convincing kids that not every adult is a jerk. Kids are great, even when they’re awful.
Adults are not all so good.
Very few parents are deliberately sabotaging their child’s future. Unfortunately, the results will be the same.
So go the wise sayings of Marty Fisher, who teaches both self-contained and Collaborative Team Teaching math and science classes at Bronx Theatre HS.
Ancient wisdom seems to come easily to the brand-new teacher.
“That’s because I’m older than everyone at the school with the exception of the principal,” the teaching fellow said. “This is a second career for me. Actually it’s more like a twelfth career.”
“When you’ve put in about 40 years in the workplace, you just don’t deal with things the way someone half or a third of your age does. You learn that to get something done you don’t necessarily have to be brilliant, although that helps, but that hard work and enough of it will take care of everything.”
The former CPA, former attorney specializing in criminal and personal injury law and former Information Technology techie is pushing 60 and is just where he wants to be in life.
“Obviously this job isn’t a resume stuffer at this point,” Fisher said. “I wanted to do work that was going to mean something at the end of the day.”
The part of his job that often feels most meaningful is being a dean for eighth period.
“You get a chance to directly help kids who are having problems,” he said. “Even when they’re getting a suspension or detention, there’s ways of doing it and ways of doing it. The most important thing is letting kids know you really care, that they are your primary concern, even when you’re doing something they don’t necessarily enjoy.”
Like his younger colleagues, Fisher is loaded down with paper work, prep, completing his master’s at night and dealing with bureaucratic red tape at any given time. He likens the Department of Education to “a Rube Goldberg device that somehow works,” referring to the cartoonist best known for designing wildly over-engineered machines that made simple tasks more complicated.
For Fisher, good teaching is sometimes about discovering what needs to get worked on. A major aha-moment came when he was perplexed by an erratic student who was “sometimes brilliant in math and at other times would completely blow it.”
Fisher discovered the girl couldn’t really read.
“She was crying yet relieved that it finally came out in the open and that people were going to do something about it with her,” he said.
The girl is now in the good hands of two devoted English teachers putting in extra time with her.
“When kids walk through the door angry or with an attitude, and you find out what’s going on in their lives when they open up to you, you feel that the mere fact they get up in the morning and come to school at all is a small miracle,” he said.
The kids in his contained classes have become his “little family.” He’s with them two periods a day and has close interaction with them, “so when they get into a jam there’s likely to be a little more candy in my bag for them than for anyone else.”
As a first-year teacher he doesn’t feel ready to give any advice to other new teachers. “But give me some time and I’ll be able to give 15 minutes of stand-up on Delaney [attendance] cards, and after that you probably won’t be able to shut me up.”
What he is sure of is his decision to become a teacher.
“I’m one of those bleeding-heart special ed teachers,” he said, “but if I ever get crusty and hard-hearted, ship me right back to the corporate world.”
