Mayor Bill de Blasio, a surprise guest, is the first mayor in two decades to speak at a UFT Spring Education Conference.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew and New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña pose with students from Aviation HS in front of the plane they are restoring at their Long Island City school. Tenth-grade sheet metal teacher Udesh Persad, himself a graduate of Aviation, said that the lessons taught in his class carry over into academic math and science classes. “They can calculate to a thousandth of an inch,” he said of his students. “It’s all intertwined. Everything they do in our class goes right back to physics.” Persad still has the miniature model plane he built in Al Bongiorno’s beginning aviation class when he was a student at the school. Bongiorno, now Persad’s mentor, had nothing but praise for the young teacher. “He’s changing students’ opinions of school,” Bongiorno said. “They look up to him.”

Dawn Watson (at right) has taught culinary arts at William E. Grady HS in Brooklyn for more than a decade and has been a fixture at the Spring Education Conference since 2007. This year she and the young aspiring chefs she teaches brought with them a delectable assortment of tea cakes, double chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies and tartlets filled with pastry cream and berries. But it’s not all sweets and treats in Watson’s classes. “Culinary arts on the whole is about life skills,” she says. “We prepare our students for the world of work and careers, and we also prepare them to go on to college.” In addition to teaching her students kitchen safety, knife skills and cooking methods, Watson instills in them the importance of punctuality, teamwork, communication and reliability, the “soft” skills she said they will need to succeed as the young chefs many of her students go on to become. While some work in corporate dining or for big-time restaurant and hospitality conglomerates like Restaurant Associates, others return to teach a new generation to cook. One of her students even began a successful cheesecake business — storefront and all — right out of high school. “It’s a recipe he learned at school,” Watson says with pride.

HVAC teacher and Chapter Leader Alrick Crowe from the HS for Energy and Technology in the Fordham section of the Bronx uses an electrical model to explain how oil heating systems work. In his classes, Crowe said, “When we do pipefitting and electrical in HVAC, we also teach algebra, trigonometry and the Pythagorean theorem.” Career and technical education courses “give students the opportunity to develop rare skills in this day and age,” he said. “They’re highly paid skills and it gives students an idea of what they can do after high school.”