Tara Jarvis traverses New York City wearing a huge grin. “People smile back at me and that’s when I realize I’m smiling,” says Jarvis, a first-year art teacher of students with special needs at District 75’s Brooklyn Transition Center. After a challenging childhood and a heart-wrenching 2017, Jarvis is living her dreams.


Immigrant students at the International HS for Health Sciences in Queens can relate to visual arts teacher Gehan Habashy, who was born and raised in Egypt.

It’s all about “kids having access to experiences, whether I do it through being a teacher or being a program director at a museum or being a Girl Scout leader,” says Leslie Martinez, who is starting her third year as a teacher at Manhattan’s Humanities Prep Academy.

Michael Oeckel, a first-year high school math teacher, employs exaggerated hand motions and expressions and gets students out of their seats to illustrate math concepts to his students who don't speak English.

About the time her body began whispering its complaints against her, ballet dancer Elizabeth Supan was ready to step off the stage and onto solid ground. That’s how she found herself at PS 133 in Harlem after earning her master’s degree in dance education with the help of the Lincoln Center Scholars Program.

After seven years of catering to adults who often acted like children, Alison Fox fled the entertainment industry for the classroom, where she teaches actual children. “Real kindergartners are so much nicer and more rewarding to spend time with,” she says.

Marilyn Casey is a 28-year-old woman who gets into her pajamas in the early evening and is sound asleep by 9:30. She is not to be pitied, however, because unlike most adults Casey goes to bed with a smile, thinking about the next day at work, where she will arrive, peppy and prepared, 45 minutes early.

In her time as a paraprofessional, Carolyn Bonaparte-Jones has assisted many fine special education teachers, but no one came close to Laila Elhanafy. “From the first day of school, everyone loved Laila," she said.

Tyler Spielberg, a wellness teacher and basketball coach at Quest to Learn, a new middle and high school in Chelsea, uses his fashion sense and common sense to teach and reach that prickly population known as middle schoolers.

Abigail Wray, a speech teacher at PS 230 in Kensington, Brooklyn, relishes the unique challenge of working with 30 students across grades 2–5.