by Marley Seaman
"It feels like home to me," Berg said after finishing his first day on the job. "There's no other district I would choose to work over this."
Berg, who teaches seventh grade math, says he considered teaching as a possible career throughout his life. He spent the winters of his sophomore and junior years as an assistant coach for the Baldwin Senior High School junior varsity basketball team, and helped run the district-wide youth clinics on weekends.
After spending a few months as a substitute in Freeport following his graduation from SUNY Albany in 2002, Berg said he knew that teaching was the job for him. He started work at Renaissance Middle School in Hollis, Queens, and began pursuing a master's degree in math education at Adelphi University. He completed his degree in May, and soon got the chance to come back to Baldwin.
"My first day was excellent," Berg said. "I felt it went very smoothly."
But he admits there was one unusual element of coming back to work: he's now working alongside some of the teachers he had as a student. All three of his sixth grade teachers, who then worked at Plaza, are now his colleagues.
"Being in meetings with the teachers that I used to have is definitely a little different," he said. "Being back in this building, but as a teacher - it's not weird, it's good."
A businessman gives back
"It's something I've always wanted to do," Robert Wentzel says of teaching. "And never really had the opportunity until about 3 or 4 years ago."
Wentzel, who substituted in Baldwin last year, came to teaching after 24 years in business. As his career advanced, he found it harder to make time for his family, and he decided to make a change.
"I was working with my own children through Scouts for the past 10 years, and it was something I started to enjoy more and more," he remembers. "I really found that's where I had a lasting satisfaction."
After several years of saving money to take "the trip," as he calls his move to education, Wentzel began teaching technology at Baldwin Senior High School on Tuesday. He is teaching five classes on four different subjects. Because of his professional knowledge, he only needed two semesters to become certified as a teacher in technology and in physics. He may soon take a test to get his certification in business.
"I was really excited to get everything going after all this effort," he said of his first day. "I wasn't nervous at all."
Teaching Italian from experience
Ignazio Stracquadanio returned to teaching this week after two decades in business. Baldwin Senior High's newest Italian teacher, who grew up in Ragusa, Sicily, has taught at the middle school, high school and college levels.
"I came [to America] after I completed my education," he says. "I went to school here both for college and university."
It was 1972 when Stracquadanio and his family came to New York. He was not the first in his family to make such a move, and is proud of it.
"My grandfather came here many, many years ago," he remembers. "So [I came] to follow in his footsteps."
Stracquadanio was a classics major in college, and speaks Latin and Spanish in addition to English and Italian. He also learned ancient Greek. He has taught Latin and Italian in the past, and is certified to teach business. For now, he is teaching five Italian classes with students in all four grades. His first day back on the job?
"Good," he says. "A lot of anxiety- the first day is always like that. But everybody is very cooperative, the school, the colleagues, and the kids are great kids."
An easy transition
"Since I was 12, I knew I wanted to be a teacher," says Yue Feng. But few teachers make the journey she has made.
Feng was born and raised in Chengdu, the capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan. She first visited America at the age of 15, when she spent a year in Michigan as an exchange student.
"I fell in love with the people and the country," she recalls. "I decided that I really wanted to come back to America, continue my education, and develop my own life here."
She began her college life at St. Martin's College in Washington. After learning about the TIME 2000 Program, which offers scholarships and training for future secondary school math teachers, she transferred to Queens College in New York.
Feng comes to Baldwin after two years at Elmont High School, and will teach Sequential Math I and III to students from grades nine through 11, and also leads one English Language Learner course.
After more than six years in America, she is more than used to living and teaching here. But it's a big contrast from her own school experience. In a Chinese school, Feng says, the day lasts from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., and there are 12 class periods separated by 10-minute breaks. Students do not change rooms between periods, and they stay with the same classmates and teachers for years, making the school much more familial.
She admits that before she came, she was concerned about fitting in.
"No matter how Americanized I am, I will always be different," she said. "I was worried that the faculty will treat me differently, or the kids will look at me differently. But what I found from Baldwin High School here is that they treat me the same, as one of them."
