
What I Do: Vasilios Tselios, senior occupational therapist
For five years, Vasilios Tselios taught students with autism to self-regulate at PS 177/The Robin Sue Ward School in Queens.
In his Jan. 21 State of the State address, Gov. Andrew Cuomo embraced the corporate reform agenda for education with a vengeance. He called for raising the cap on charter schools, extending teachers’ probationary period from three to five years, putting struggling schools into “receivership” and basing half a teacher’s evaluation on student test scores.
The governor used his address, which was combined this year with his executive budget, to blame high school teachers for failing to graduate students ready for college and to blame elementary and middle school teachers for failing to get students to pass new and harder ELA and math tests.
Success Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz and anti-tenure crusader Campbell Brown cheered the governor’s proposals, but many public school teachers were incensed.
“The governor’s speech served warmed-up Bloomberg leftovers,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew. “He ignores the real problems and…
UFT President Michael Mulgrew asked delegates at the Delegate Assembly on Jan. 14 to encourage their colleagues to use social media to show how Governor Cuomo’s proposals on education would be destructive to public schools, educators and students.
What does good reading instruction look like? It would be so nice if it were easy to say.
As a math teacher at International Community HS in the South Bronx, Aristides Julmarx Galdones Uy hears a frequent question from skeptical students: “When am I going to use this in the real world?”
Uy is determined to show them. A few years ago, to teach the concept of measuring angles — a fundamental lesson in geometry — he dispensed with traditional worksheets. Combing trade books and magazines rather than textbooks for lesson plans, he hit upon the idea of asking his students to design their own pipe systems using actual welding equipment. Using real plumbing and engineering workbooks to guide them, Uy’s students found themselves cutting and soldering pipes with blowtorches.
“Even a small miscalculation or a wrong measurement would lead to leaks,” recalls Uy, known universally to his colleagues and students as “Mr. Ari.” “It definitely got them excited.”
It is that ingenuity that…
Forget what you think you know about math: At the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan, it’s not something you work on with pencil and paper.
Through a combination of research-based programs and targeted intervention strategies, PS 112, a K–2 school in East Harlem, has developed a well-rounded reading curriculum.
For five years, Vasilios Tselios taught students with autism to self-regulate at PS 177/The Robin Sue Ward School in Queens.
UFT retirees are volunteering in a new tutoring program designed to strengthen the basic literacy and math skills of struggling students in two of the UFT’s Community Learning Schools.
Teachers and other pedagogues are credited with one day of “sick leave” on the 16th of each month of the school year, or 10 days for a full school year of work.
Constantly organizing new members is critical to the health of every union, and the UFT is no exception. Unions must either grow or decline; a union that is not expanding is in trouble.
Gov. Cuomo is so enthusiastic about charter schools that he wants to greatly expand their number even though he acknowledges that they are not accepting the same number of high-needs students as public schools.
The academic capability of new teachers in New York City has risen over the past 15 years, new research shows.
By guiding my students, I helped them overcome their insecurities with answering multiple-choice questions. Even my lowest-achieving students gained confidence as they actually asked for more multiple-choice questions to practice these strategies on.
Abigail Wray, a speech teacher at PS 230 in Kensington, Brooklyn, relishes the unique challenge of working with 30 students across grades 2–5.
February is one of those months. The afterglow of the holidays is gone. Those of us shivering in the north and even the unhuddled southern snowbirds have time to reflect on the wintry depths of experience or memory.
My thoughts are political and from a labor perspective. The horrendous news, nationally and internationally, of the past year brings to mind Yeats’ poetic caution: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” — in this case, an intensity with ripple effects.
Everybody sooner or later sits down to Robert Louis Stevenson’s “banquet of consequences” and we must face those consequences. How do we square the labor movement’s innate, long-range optimism with the consequences of the antiprogressive triumph of the last election? Well, we face it boldly and move on to the coming fight. Every new…