Mr. Reingold's Room

I have had this idea in my head for a long time, and I have avoided writing it until now. I’ve been feeling it’s premature to put it down and put it out. But now I am starting to realize that this idea will evolve over time. Or maybe I’ll just be expressing it differently. There’s no reason to hold off. I’ve had a calling to be a teacher all my life. Sometimes I forget it, because I thought the profession seemed out of reach for me. Or I avoided it because I feared I wouldn’t be able to stand it. My beloved spouse tells me that I have always said I wanted to be a teacher, even though I don’t remember telling her every year. She assures me I do. My beloved father, may he rest in peace, said that teaching is the noblest profession, especially when the teacher is a scholar. He thought he would have been happiest if he had been a History teacher. His most inspiring teacher was a History teacher he had in high school. Dad went to Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn and graduated in app...

  I've been tutoring in various ways to gain the skills to teach. One of my employers has given me two placements. One is assisting in a 3rd grade classroom at a school in East Harlem. The other is helping 7th graders prepare for the SHSAT, an entrance exam that a small group of public high schools in New York City use. The 7th graders all attend a middle school in Queens. The 7th grade work is remote, so I meet with small groups of students after school over video conference. I turn my camera on briefly so they can see me, and then I turn it off to conserve bandwidth. There is only one student who chooses to turn his camera on. The others never do, and some are even reluctant to turn their microphones on. It's a difficult medium, but many teachers and students have learned to deal with it, and now some prefer it. The exam is in English and Math, and I never thought of myself as a good English student, but interestingly, I find I have things to say about the material. I guess I...

    I tutored a new student. He's in college. I helped him with his Computer Science class, specifically in skills for using the Linux operating system. When our session was over, he told me that I had explained in one hour more than his professor had explained in 15 weeks. He also encouraged me on my path towards becoming a classroom teacher, as he thinks I would do well at it. It's nice to get encouragement like this.

 I spent my third consecutive Saturday at the tutoring center. I should mention that the students are very well behaved and barely even show any emotion, even when they receive praise or correction. At the beginning of my first session with the students, a girl in fourth grade said to me. in an excited voice, “I made something for you!” It was a work of art. Of course, I was touched, but I was also surprised. I’m not sure what I did in the first two sessions to stand out in the student’s mind. I know I’m not the best teacher ever, but perhaps it was a bit of kindness. This is the type of reward a teacher might hope to receive after years of teaching, not after two sessions.

I spent my first day tutoring kids from 2nd through 5th grade. There are several of us tutor/teachers at the office on Saturdays. The office has after school tutoring times as well; I'm only working there on Saturdays. It's interesting to see each kid's strengths and weaknesses in Math and English. I think I noticed most kids are good in one but not the other. Some fun memories are from a fifth grade boy. He is hyperactive and inattentive at times, though I'm not diagnosing him as ADHD, as I'm not qualified to do that. He is strong in math and can barely keep his eyes on text when he is reading English. He looked at the tie I was wearing and asked, "Are you the president?" I asked if it was because of the tie, and he said yes. I told him I don't want to be president, and the discussion went back to the lesson. The director helped me on my first day, observing and leading the lesson at times. She asked him what he knew of punctuation. He said he didn...

For the last year or so, I've been saying, "I'm going to be a teacher when I grow up." Now I realize I can say I am a teacher. I tutored two ninth graders in the winter and spring. I tutored several middle school students this spring, helping them prepare for the SHSAT high school entrance exam in New York City. Now I'm doing two more things. I recently began tutoring a man I will call CI. He is 18 years old, and he has autism and several various challenges in preparing him for the world. I'm also about to begin teaching a handful of students to help them catch up in their regular school studies. My work with CI is largely teaching him life skills. There are so many social skills that we expect everyone to have, because we tend to pick them up as we go along, but we can't take them for granted with autistic people. My work with the younger students will be to bring them up to speed in Math and English. The work will be at a small tutoring center in Chinato...

The champion of the national spelling bee this year is a young woman (in 8th grade, I presume) an African American, the first ever to be the national champion. I have confidence there will be many more. There are many languages around the world, and many of them use alphabets. Of all the languages that use alphabets, English is the one which requires students to study spelling up through 8th grade. It's because our spelling is more complex and inconsistent than in any other language. Many successful people never become good spellers, but that doesn't mean being good at spelling is useless. You will find it to be useful to become as proficient at spelling as you can, even though many find it hard, and no one can possibly be perfect at it. NY Times Story, July 8, 2021