To many students, teachers are people who are restricted to school. They must wake up, eat, breathe and sleep in the classroom, right? However, that is not the case. Teachers were once in the shoes of their students, figuring out their lives and future in their adolescence with a whole story to what led them to becoming the teachers Baruchians have grown to know and appreciate today.
The teachers’ journey to teaching may not seem easy. They took the time to achieve their goal as a teacher and worked really hard to get their job, with many of them earning both a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
Discovering how some of the teachers went on their journey to becoming a teacher can be pretty surprising and illuminating; there were some interesting facts about them that students did not know about. Somehow, Baruch teachers have facts that they have in common–many of them had similar experiences before coming to teaching.
Jocelyn Forman, who teaches Algebra 2 and AP Calculus, went to the University of Rochester for special education classes. She explained why she wanted to become a teacher and that she decided to do so early.
“I knew I wanted to become a teacher in sixth grade,” she said.
In order to do that, she had to spend many years studying both math and education before coming to BCCHS.
“I went to college and studied math and education. I went to graduate school at Teachers College and after I graduated, I was teaching in BCCHS in 2017 as a math teacher,” she said.
Darius Lewis, global literature teacher for ninth and tenth grade, attended College of New Jersey for his bachelors and Columbia University for his masters, gave a similar response to Forman on his journey to becoming a teacher.
“I was in college when I got a master’s degree in education and got my bachelor’s degree for English,” said Lewis.
However, unlike Forman, Lewis wasn’t a high school teacher immediately after he graduated from college. Instead, he worked in an elementary school before deciding that it wasn’t for him.
“Before teaching in BCCHS, I taught in an elementary school. I didn’t like working with younger
kids because I wanted to teach older students,” said Lewis.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Zachariah Davis decided that he wanted to pursue a career in education as a teacher after working in TV for many years.
“Right around Covid, I was feeling [like] I liked the people I worked with in TV, but I just felt like I
I wasn’t doing anything important, and I felt like I had experiences–which I liked–teaching, and I wanted to do something that felt more fulfilling,” said Davis.
Davis participated in a program called Teaching Fellows at City College of New York to develop his teaching skills.
John Downes-Angus attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut to earn his bachelors in English and now teaches AP Lang and English for seniors. He explained that he wasn’t initially interested in school until his junior year, where he found his passion for reading and literature.
“I was a bad student in high school until my junior year when I started reading and then I started to find school more interesting…Someone gave me a book called “The Brothers of Karamazov,” a Russian novel by a guy named Fyodor Dostoevsky…I read it and then I discovered that like I was a little smarter than I thought I was, and then I started caring more about school because I realized that I could do it,” said Downes-Angus.
Baruch’s teachers worked hard to get to where they are today, all taking many years to hone in their craft no matter how unique or similar their individual journey is. Their journey, while unique, can provide insight to students who want to follow similar career paths to their teachers.
