RECENT VISIT TO BRONX SCIENCE
RECENT VISIT TO BRONX SCIENCE
Sent: 6/18/96; 2:01:55 PM
From: yonald@garcon.mit.edu (Yonald Chery)
I recently visited the school on a Friday afternoon. The building looked pretty much the same. The mosiac mural still adorns the wall above the main entrance. There was lots of scaffolding down along the building (in the campus area) for what must be some exterior repair work in progress.
After wandering from department to department, it seemed that most of the teachers I knew had either left to teach elsewhere, retired, or were on sabbatical.
However, I did come upon Joanne Strauss, my trigonometry teacher during my sophomore year. We chatted about what had passed during the 12 years since I graduated. Apparently, Stuyvesant has a new building and more and more would-be Science students are choosing to go there. She told me that during the past few years, many of her freshman math team students were re-taking the admission exam to transfer to Stuyvesant.
Last year, one of her students was violently attacked and slashed by a deranged homeless person two blocks from the school. This poor student had upwards of two hundred stitches and some plastic surgery. Such incidents are truly tragic and fuel the fears of parents of would-be Science students about letting their child commute to the Bronx. With Stuyvesant having newer facilities and being a less dangerous commute (or so I'm told), it's no surprise that people would rather go there.
I guess teachers leaving Science to teach elsewhere is also a bad sign. It didn't hit me at the time, but I thought teaching at Science was a highly coveted opportunity. So if teachers are leaving, then is this no longer the case?
I did notice happily that the student populace appeared more diverse and multicultural then I remember it ever being when I was there from '80 through '84.
Oh well, so much for my trip down memory lane,
Yonald Chery '84 yonald@mit.edu
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