Feature Stories
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Erica Berger
As educators, teachers know best what supplies they need for their classrooms. The Teacher’s Choice program, which reimburses educators for the purchase of classroom supplies of their choice, is a direct investment in classroom learning. Teacher’s Choice funding was eliminated four years ago and last year, teachers received $77, down from a pre-recession high of $220. Teachers spend an average of $500 above the Teacher’s Choice allotment on classroom supplies, according to the UFT’s inaugural teachers’ survey last spring.
That’s why the UFT has mounted a campaign to restore the funding in the city budget. We asked teachers to tell their stories about the essential work they have been able to do with Teacher’s Choice. The teachers featured on this page were among the more than 500 who shared their experiences with us.
Please go to action.uft.org/restore-teachers-choice to share these stories with your social networks.
Use the hashtag #RestoreTeachersChoice on Twitter to tweet at your City Council member about why Teacher’s Choice matters to you and your students.
Gabrielle Lisiewski: New, colorful books
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I buy a lot of books because the books that are provided in my classroom library are really outdated — nothing that students are interested in reading, nothing that stands out to them. I get excited about books and I want my students to get excited about books, so I buy new, colorful books to interest them.
I also have some students who have difficulties with fluency so whenever I find a book, I buy the matching audio CD for our listening center. It really motivates my lower-level readers and gives them confidence. But materials are expensive and right now I only have one pair of headphones.
Ellen Gentilviso: How to build a city
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Salvadori is a program that shows students how art, design, math and science are embedded in the buildings, bridges and landmarks of the city. I do the project as an extension of a social studies unit on China with my 3rd-grade gifted and talented class.
We visit a small triangle park on Montgomery and East Broadway that sits at the edge of Chinatown where it meets the Lower East Side. Then we redesign it with an Asian theme. We learn about Asian architecture. We visit the edges of Chinatown and notice how the signs change.
Charlene Johnson: Lords of the butterflies
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Part of our reading unit is about awesome animals and insects. We wanted to explore the metamorphosis stage of butterflies, but the school’s funding couldn’t support us in that so we ordered it on our own using Teacher’s Choice funding. Each kid gets his or her own caterpillar and sees it grow each and every day — they name the caterpillar, they talk to it, they really get to become caregivers. It would have been a hard process for them to internalize without seeing it in the room.
Every day the children were so excited; my on-time attendance actually improved because they were literally dragging their parents through the door to come to see the butterflies. Read more
Joanne Genova: Expensive experiments
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I teach students in grades K–5 either once or twice a week; each lesson ends with a lab experiment of some sort. That’s around 17 classes’ worth of experiments a week. So how do I run these labs? With everyday household goods, of course! For example, for a unit on matter, my 1st-graders make a polymer, which is a different kind of matter — not solid, liquid or gas. It’s slime! We make it with cornstarch, Elmer’s glue and food coloring. Or I use cotton balls and eyedroppers to teach about clouds and precipitation in the water-cycle unit.
This may sound financially feasible but multiply 17 classes a few times a month — you end up spending a pretty high amount. Read more
Rachel Tully: Just the basics
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When I first came to my school, I felt the same way a lot of people do — that students should bring their own supplies. But when you work in an impoverished area, you find that more and more children come to school with nothing — not even a pencil to write with. A lot of these parents are on a month-to-month income, trying to pay the bills; they can’t afford to do school-supply shopping.
I’ve had kids without book bags because their mom couldn’t get them one, or kids who bring in homework written in crayon or marker because they didn’t have a pencil at home.
Michelle Rand: Reading, writing and algebra tiles
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With Teacher’s Choice, I purchased Didax algebra tiles to use as manipulatives during my 7th-grade expressions-and-equations unit. The tiles are squares and rectangles of different colors and sizes. The way I used them was to represent variables, which kids typically have a hard time with, because it’s a representation of something that changes. The tiles are good for the tactile learners especially. For example, they can represent positive and negative integers and the students see how “positive” tiles cancel out “negatives.” The students just physically remove what are called “opposite pairs.” It’s a more hands-on approach to algebra.