Giving Back Before Going Forward

Think the world of finance is tough? Try spending a day teaching in a Manhattan middle school

by Peter N. Chung

I'm in my second year of teaching through the Teach for America program, a national corps of recent college graduates who teach for two years in low-income urban and rural public schools. More than 3,500 Teach for America instructors are in more than 1,000 schools around the country. I teach seventh grade math in Harlem, New York's Intermediate School 286.

After receiving my BS in finance at the University of Florida, I joined Raymond James & Assoc. as an equity-research associate under a Wall Street Journal-ranked analyst. Despite a great two-year education in business, I felt like I wasn't contributing much to society. Reflecting on my love of children, and after much deliberation, I applied and was accepted into the Teach for America program.

My school is Title I, which means it qualifies for governmental funding for remedial education programs for poor and disadvantaged public-school students. The students I teach generally come from broken homes and dire financial conditions, and about 82% of students at the school qualify for free lunch, according to the most recent statistics. The population is about 76% African American and 23% Latino.

Here's a typical day at school:

7:20 a.m. -- I'm out the door with a hazelnut coffee and The Wall Street Journal in hand. I take the No. 1 subway uptown.

7:40 a.m. -- I sign in at the main office and greet fellow teachers before walking into my classroom. I start reading a few pages of the newspaper before my homeroom arrives.

8:00 a.m. -- Homeroom officially begins, but none of my students are in the classroom yet. I find out they're still being scanned through the school metal detectors.

8:10 a.m. -- My kids finally trickle in, and I quickly take attendance before shuttling them off to their first period class -- social studies.

8:25 a.m. -- I have to make 35 copies of a handout I need for my afternoon class, but the copier in the main office is down…again.

8:30 a.m. -- After unsuccessfully fidgeting with the copier, I jet upstairs and convince someone on the third floor, which houses a separate school, to run the copies for me. I promise her a doughnut and coffee from the corner bodega.

8:45 a.m. -- I catch up on some personal e-mails.

8:55 a.m. -- Classes start to let out, and I try to patrol the hallways. It's pandemonium as several teachers try to calm down the kids who are running around, yelling, and hitting each other "for fun."

9:10 a.m. -- Most of the kids are in class by now. I have five students for extra math tutoring. I play a little John Coltrane for them while we learn, but my students just giggle and think I'm weird.

9:45 a.m. -- I tweak some of my lessons and make them age- and level-appropriate for my students.

10:30 a.m. -- It's time to teach my first class of the day. I hope I'll make it through.

10:45 a.m. -- I send an unruly child to the assistant principal's office. Nothing really happens, and she's sent back to my room, where she continues to be a nuisance.

11:20 a.m. -- There's a loud ruckus in the hallway so I stop the class and walk outside to witness a fight. I tell a student to get a school safety security officer and I run out to try to break it up.

11:25 a.m. -- The commotion dies down, but my students are still charged up from the incident. I try my best to get them back to math, but I don't know if it's working. I think it's going to be a long day.

Noon -- My second class of the day begins. I have a wonderful lesson where the kids are engaged and having fun.

12:45 p.m. -- I go to the corner store with some fellow teachers to pick up lunch and bring it back to school. We talk about the day so far and complain about the administration and some of the kids. I make plans for happy hour.

1:30 p.m. -- My second class comes back from lunch, and we finish up for the day.

2:20 p.m. -- School ends but I have 10 kids come after school to get math tutoring. We review some lessons and work on homework from today.

3:30 p.m. -- I clean up my classroom and leave for happy hour. Man, I need a drink.

6:00 p.m. -- I go for a run in Central Park to relieve some stress and forget about the drama of the day.

8:00 p.m. -- I grade some papers and work on some lesson plans while watching a movie.

11:00 p.m. -- A second e-mail check of the day, and then I read a book before going to bed.

Teaching -- especially in an under-resourced urban school -- has been the toughest job I've ever had. And if you've never heard it before, boy is middle school hard. The emotional and physical toll it takes on you can be overwhelming at times. But at the end of the day, the thought of making a difference in at least one child's life keeps me going.

This fall, I will be majoring in finance and real estate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in pursuit of my MBA. I hope to achieve a career in real estate or investment management. Long-term, I want to manage investment funds focused on low-income communities and create a foundation that focuses on educational opportunities for underprivileged children.

If you spur economic development in underserved areas, that can trickle down to the kids. Being part of Teach for America has exposed me to the types of issues that children in those types of areas go through on a daily basis and helped me to understand their plight.

Peter can be reached via e-mail at petridish2000@gmail.com