From Student to Teacher and Back Again

Every semester, Stuyvesant students enjoy learning from student teachers in multiple departments. Outside of the classroom, we don’t know much about these members of the staff. We spoke with three student teachers from the English department to learn about what brought them to Stuyvesant, and what they have learned so far.

Brianne Rosa

“I think [coming to Stuyvesant] was this personal desire for myself that I could get in because I didn't get in when I was in eighth grade,” student teacher Brianne Rosa admitted. Before fulfilling her dream of coming to Stuyvesant, though, Rosa fell in love with teaching English in South Korea following her graduation as a business major. Unable to study abroad in college, Rosa seized this opportunity to teach as a part of this special program. After returning from South Korea and having a brief stay as a real estate agent in the Hamptons, Rosa decided to pursue an education as a teacher at the Teachers College at Columbia University.

Just as coming to Stuyvesant is extremely challenging for many students, it has not been a walk in the park for student teachers, either. Rosa remembers coming into Stuyvesant and meticulously planning out her lessons every day, including reading quizzes to ensure that her students were reading at night. However, she soon realized, “Oh my god, we are totally missing all these awesome conversations that we should be having in the classroom because we’re spending all this time on these stupid quizzes that I am so attached to.” Rosa realized that in order to improve as a teacher and engage her students more, she had to partner up with them. “I trust that they read and let us have a conversation. Once I started doing that, everything else was so much better,” she detailed.

Though the transition to Stuyvesant was difficult, challenges often come with successes, and Rosa is no stranger to that notion. When asked about her most validating moment at Stuyvesant, she laughed. “There are so many, so many,” she said. She fondly remembers a time when one of her students told her, “Ms. Rosa, you’re so good at English.” Rosa admitted,“That really means a lot to me.”

For Rosa, the biggest lesson she learned during her time at Stuyvesant was when she was forced to teach less in order to become a better teacher. “I learned that often when I step back and stop teaching, the students’ voices become amplified and they start to fill in the space with their understanding, their interpretation, and they start to do the work of teaching themselves,” she explained. As someone who spent most of her high school education sitting in rows listening to lectures, she knows how disengaged students can easily become when teachers simply speak to them for the whole lesson. Rosa learned about the importance of stepping back at Teachers College, but coming to Stuyvesant was the first time she was able to put this idea into practice.

Philip Kohn

Before finding his love for teaching, Philip Kohn had originally planned on pursuing a career in editing and publishing. He realized that it would be very difficult to find a job in this field, especially considering the competitiveness of the job and little experience he had in the field. Kohn explained, “I thought about the most practical way I could use my English degree, and teaching English was something that just kept coming up.” During his graduate program, Kohn realized that teaching English was the perfect way for him to continue pursuing his passion for literature while also making use of his degree.

Kohn recalled planning out lessons diligently for the periods when Assistant Principal of English Eric Grossman would be observing the class. Kohn found that he performed well during these stressful observations. He recounted an observation with his supervisor present as his most challenging and gratifying moment at Stuyvesant. “[My supervisor] had a particular comment, which was very nice. I don’t know if it was justified or not, but she left a comment that was, ‘I would be happy having you teach anyone I loved.’ I don’t know that I fully deserved it. I thought I did well that day, but that was almost over the top for me,” he recalled. “But it felt very good nonetheless.”

From his experience preparing lessons, Kohn realized that he could not structure each class the same way, since each period of Freshman Composition had a different dynamic. “Not too long ago, I was teaching [a] lesson in my fourth-period class and it did not go particularly well,” he said. “I did the same lesson with a few tweaks in my sixth-period class, thinking about this as a more interactive class [...] and I addressed a few things. And it went much better and this is 40 minutes apart from each other.”

Sapna Chemplavil

Sapna Chemplavil, who works with English teacher Alicia Pohan, was introduced to teaching from a political justice angle. “I was working in an AmeriCorps program that did after school programming […] so I was getting into that, but I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a teacher,” she explained. “Then [in] the second year, I was in charge of the training of the people who are in my job, and I realized when I could come up with my own lesson plans, I liked it a lot.” After working mostly in low-income minority neighborhoods in Oakland, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., Chemplavil wanted to come to Stuyvesant to gain learning experience while working in a different environment.

At all her previous schools, Chemplavil found that some teachers believed that their students were not capable of learning. Stuyvesant has shown her a different perspective, one where teachers assume that their students are smart and intellectually curious.

Some of Chemplavil’s most gratifying moments while teaching at Stuyvesant come from her interactions with students. Coming from a background of teaching low-performing students, Chemplavil has often come across those who believe they do not have the ability to complete certain tasks. Even though Stuyvesant is perceived as a high-performing school, Chemplavil has seen the same sentiment at Stuyvesant. “I can think of one student who, for our first assignment, kept thinking he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it, but he finally turned in the paper […] and it was great, and he just had no concept of how great it was because he had gotten it into his head that he wasn’t a good student,” she recalled.

Chemplavil is used to extensively scaffolding her lessons, or meticulously planning out tens of questions that she asks her students throughout the course of her lesson in order to lead them to a certain idea. However, at Stuyvesant, students try their hardest to get to that idea, and as a result, do not need to be led on as much. “There’s a little bit less of a motivation challenge here than there is at some other schools,” she said.

She has also reshaped her lesson plans to facilitate a better flow of ideas. “I’ve refined some of my transitions [...] to make it easier for students to make connections between seemingly disparate transitions,” she explained. In addition, she has been blown away by how fast Stuyvesant classes speed through their material. A good teacher can make their class fly by in the blink of an eye, but a good class has that same effect on its teacher.