The Spectator ● October 20, 2014
Page 9
Features The Mother Duck’s Story Meet Catherine McRoy-Mendell: money-handling extraordinaire and mother to several hundred ducklings. For the past three years, McRoy-Mendell has taught AP Macroeconomics, AP Microeconomics, and Economics at Stuyvesant. As a teacher who feels responsible for the welfare of her students, McRoy-Mendell often sees herself as a mama duck and her students as “duckies.” Her motto, “I’ll put you under my wings, and guide you along the econ way,” illustrates her warm and effective approach to teaching. Every mama duck, however, must stumble and learn from her mistakes before becoming capable of helping others. McRoyMendell shared her tale of her journey from a duckie to a mama duck with The Spectator, detailing the ups and downs in her life as well as the beliefs that drove her to where she is today. It all began when her parents decided to emigrate to the U.S. from Poland a year before she was born. They settled down in the small city of Norwalk, Connecticut, where McRoy-Mendell spent most of her childhood and teenage years. She did gymnastics to “channel [her] boundless energy” and especially loved playing the flute, which she started learning in fourth grade. The flute, however, was not the instrument McRoy-Mendell intended to play—her initial choice was the clarinet. But because she never succeeded in getting the reed to buzz, she picked up the flute. Mcroy-Mendell ended up playing it for the next ten years and regularly entered competitions and recitals. In high school, McRoy-Mendell participated in a marching band that traveled all over the Northeast for competitions. When asked how good she was, McRoy-Mendell said she was ranked fourth in the state in 2001. “But it was Connecticut,” she added humbly. But as high school drew to a close, McRoy-Mendell struggled to decide what to focus on in col-
lege. While she enjoyed the flute, she didn’t believe it would bring her the stable career that she desired, and frankly she did not like performing in public. “I actually had really bad stage fright in high school,” she admitted. And so, with no idea of what to do with her future, McRoy-Mendell turned to business. Her decision to study business was not influenced by anybody or anything in particular. “I just asked myself, ‘What is a practical degree and something that I’m interested in?’” McRoyMendell said. “And I was like, business is something that I’m interested in, so I could learn how to run my own business and if not, then I can work for another business.” In the end, McRoy-Mendell decided to attend McGill University. Located in Montreal, Quebec, McGill was known for its strong music and business courses. It was an unexpected choice. For six years, McRoy-Mendell had learned Spanish in school, so she was surprised to find herself applying to a school full of French Canadians. In addition, her friends felt that the school was too far away. Fortunately, the professors at McGill taught in English, and to her friends, McRoy-Mendell argued, “It’s still closer than LA.” To this day, McRoy does not regret attending McGill (to this day, she also cannot speak French). She found the experience eyeopening, mostly because of the change that came with living in such a big city compared to homey Norwalk. The school forced her to grow up by demanding that she be independent. “I remember visiting McGill, and that after [the] first year, you have to move out of the dorms and go find your own place,” McRoy-Mendell recounted. “I remember being just so scared as a seventeen-year-old.” Nevertheless, McRoy-Mendell was determined to stay at McGill and as a result matured very quickly. She stopped taking flute lessons in her second year when it became impossible for her to juggle the flute with her management classes. As planned, McRoy-Mendell put her business degree to good
use; it was not long after graduating that McRoy-Mendell began to work in a bank on Wall Street, where her job focused on compensation. This means that her role was to distribute the base salaries and bonuses among the workers. Her job was important because the amount of base or bonus given to an employee could motivate that person to continue working or make them disgruntled enough to leave. Ironically, McRoy-Mendell, the person in charge of motivating employees to stay, ended up resigning from the bank four years later. Though her job at Wall Street paid well (all her college loans were paid back within around a year), the stress was too much for her to handle. “Once I got into it, I learned that’s what I thought I wanted and then you kind of grow up as a person. Your priorities change sometimes. I was realizing I just wasn’t enjoying it,” McRoyMendell reflected. Her work called for a minimum of ten hours of labor every day and demanded high accuracy under a short time crunch. During end of the year evaluations that took place in the fall, she never knew when she would arrive home. “Thanksgiving always sucked,” McRoy-Mendell remarked. She decided that enough was enough—the mama duck was leaving. Though disappointed that Wall Street did not work out, McRoyMendell rebounded quickly and decided to chase a new passion: teaching. “I had always liked the idea,” she said. “Even when I was at my firm, I was a mentor … to onboarding members, I would [teach] the ropes of trade.” Going further back a step, she was a teacher’s assistant who taught fellow undergraduates at McGill. Once sure of her decision, McRoyMendell decided to attend Columbia’s Teacher’s College to get a teaching degree. It was there that she was introduced to Stuyvesant for the first time; part of her curriculum involved working at another school as a student teacher. McRoy-Mendell worked under the guidance of social studies teachers Jennifer
Suri, Josina Dunkel, and now-retired economics teacher Clarissa Bushman. While teaching under their wings, she found herself falling in love with the students at Stuyvesant. Despite her desire to work at Stuyvesant immediately after finishing Teacher’s College, McRoy-Mendell was not hired because the administration did not have any open positions for her. Instead, she was a substitute teacher at charter schools for approximately a year, reinforcing the skills she acquired from her time student teaching. “The Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn sometimes,” she described her adventures. “Yeah, I was all over, geez. That’s the thing with substitute teaching: you find out maybe the night before where you’re going the next day and it could be anywhere.” Throughout this whole time, McRoy-Mendell stayed in touch with Suri, hoping that a position in the social studies department would open up. When Bushman retired, McRoy-Mendell was immediately contacted for the job, bringing her to the position that she stands in today. And so ended McRoy-Mendell’s years as a duckie. Since then, she has been very happy as a teacher at Stuyvesant. McRoyMendell fills the room with her eccentric personality and upbeat attitude. The rhythm of the class is
fast-paced but optimistic, as she welcomes students to ask questions and make mistakes. “I (insert name here) hereby promise I will not hate Ms. McRoy-Mendell for her booboo,” she had students pledge when she made a mistake in her work. McRoy-Mendell still remembers the imbalance of her work and social life in her Wall Street years and tries to apply this experience in her classrooms. “Every weekend, part of their homework assignment is to go do something for themselves. At first they think, ‘Oh, she’s so full of it’… And then they get surprised when every Monday I ask them, ‘What did you do for yourself this weekend?’ Just this morning I cautioned them with, ‘You can either tell me two to four sentences about what you did do yourself this weekend or you can write me a two page paper on why you didn’t do anything for yourself this weekend,’” McRoyMendell said. She soon returned to the lesson’s topic, now applying the knowledge she gained through studying at McGill and working on Wall Street itself. As we grow older, it is usually deemed unfitting to end stories with the confirmation of a “happily ever after,” but in the case of McRoy-Mendell, it can’t hurt to wish her and her students a “quackily ever after.”
Jan Li / The Spectator
By Alice Cheng
Ms. McRoy-Mendell instructs her students, whom she calls “duckies”, on the intricacies of calculating GDP.
Dr. Ned: Cultivating a Love for Science
Stephanie Chan / The Spectator
playing with, but the rules governing those were very different in the ‘30s and ‘40s. So my father lived near a chemical supply store and was able to buy stuff like nitrogen-based explosives, and he made waxes in his mother’s kitchen. I don’t know how he survived that, but he did all these things based on stuff he learned from school. He viewed Stuyvesant as an intellectually rich environment. He knew it was sanctuary like I did, and he spoke of it very fondly.
Dr. Maria Nedwidek-Moore speaks about her journey from being a Stuyvesant student, to a Stuyvesant teacher.
By Geena Jung and Kachun Leung Stuyvesant biology teacher and alumna Maria Nedwidek-Moore (‘88) talks to The Spectator about her influences in life, her memories of being a Stuyvesant student and the importance of being an educator. What memory stands out the most to you from your time at Stuyvesant as a student? Well, it was before I even started school here: the entrance exam. I was scared out of my mind, as was common. I was 13, my father took me, and it was raining. I had to go to the bathroom, and I didn’t know where the bathrooms were.
I didn’t even know I could go to the bathroom. My former biology teacher, Mrs. Bierig, was also my exam proctor. When she stopped the class at the end of the test and told us to put our pencils down, I didn’t put my pencil down, so she screamed at me to stop. I was petrified out of my mind. She and I later became close friends when I started working here! You mentioned that your father went to Stuyvesant; was he the reason you wanted to come here? My father (’46) learned certain things in Stuyvesant about highly dangerous chemicals that would react and explode. They were things children shouldn’t be
Did you have a favorite teacher? My freshman year English teacher. Her name was Lynne Evans. She taught me formal grammar, she was patient, she was positive, and she did a lot of positive reinforcement. The class was at the end of the day during my freshman year in my first term. I don’t know if you remember how tired you were freshman year, but the end of the day is not your best moment. It felt good to end with her every day. Did she ever impact the way you teach? She had a really positive attitude on the class. I might not always have that type of attitude. Sometimes I get annoyed, but remembering that she never really seemed to show that she was annoyed and that she always seemed to be in a positive mood was something that I found comforting.
What made you want to go into biology? I was in middle school, and I went to Louis Armstrong Middle School. My second year there I had a chemistry sequence with Ms. Daly. She realized I liked science, and this was when I realized science was something I was good at. She told me she wanted to mentor me after school, so regularly I would meet with her and do special projects. She was the first person that taught me how to use a microscope properly; she taught me how to do dissections. It was my interaction with her that taught me science was fun. So that’s when I got that this wasn’t just something that I liked, but something that I can do and that I might be good at. How do you think Stuyvesant has changed from when you were a student to now? When I was here, we were all about colleges, but it wasn’t as competitive as now. Now, the kids are all doing early decisions, and if they don’t get into the school they want, their worlds fall apart. In my time, we applied regular decision and waited until we got into a bunch of places. Also, I took two APs in Stuy, AP Bio and Calculus BC in my senior year. That’s it! Now, sophomores are taking AP classes, and may have up to 10 APs under their belt by graduation.
If you were an animal, which one would you be and why? A blue-fronted amazon parrot. If I had my choice, I would be a tropical bird capable of meaningful speech with longevity. They live so long because they can communicate well, which allows them to escape predation, and they have superior logic. Plus, birds can fly. That’s insanely cool from a mechanical perspective; I wouldn’t need a plane ticket. If you weren’t a teacher, what do you think your profession would be? If I had my way and I could get in to see Obama, I would sit down and say, “Hey! These are the things I want to do. Give me the money and an office. These are the things I see that work, these are the things I see that don’t work. We need to cultivate a love for science and math, and develop as many creative minds as we can. We’re already good, but it could be so much more amazing. Don’t just throw money at the problems; use the money to make things available and develop these amazing minds because once they get turned off to science and math at a critical age, there’s no getting it back.” These are the things that I want to see happen. I don’t know if I can accomplish them, but they’re things to think about. This interview has been condensed and edited.