Volume 106, Issue 6 by The Stuyvesant Spectator

The Spectator ● December 2, 2015

Page 4

Courtesy of the Stuyvesant Pre-Medical Society

The Founding of CityMD: CEO Richard Park on Spreading Kindness

By Anne George and Elijah Karshner “You’re at Stuyvesant,” Dr. Richard Park (’90), Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at CityMD and Emergency Medicine physician, said. “You guys are capable and healthy. I can’t tell you how important that is.” Over 150 students gathered on Tuesday, November 10 to listen to Dr. Park as he chronicled the

founding of CityMD and why he established a motto of “kindness” as the basis of his business. Dr. Park’s visit was organized by the Stuyvesant Pre-Medical Society and hosted by junior and president Evelyn Gotlieb and sophomore and vice president Sofiya Tsenter. Dr. Park began his lecture by emphasizing that financial circumstances should not determine the opportunities a student is provided. After Dr. Park grad-

uated from Stuyvesant, he chose to take a gap year before attending the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania due to financial difficulties. He described how he felt isolated from his peers because while they were financially-able to attend college, he had to open his own business, a one-hour photo store. Throughout college, Dr. Park commuted from his Pennsylvania dorm to the store every weekend to pay for his education. After graduating from Wharton and later completing medical school, Park began his Emergency Medicine residency at Long Island Jewish Hospital. Following his residency, however, Dr. Park was met with the challenges of raising an autistic and nonverbal child. His experiences have led him to establish the premise of kindness for himself and all that he pursues. Though he knows his children will always rely on him in a way non-autistic children would not, he is able to recognize the effects kindness can have on anyone. Dr. Park felt obliged to spread kindness in its simplest forms and carry along this initiative in the creation of CityMD in 2010. “When you appreciate people and you love people, you can do amazing things. You can do more than you ever knew you could,” Dr. Park said. Currently, there are 48 CityMD locations, with a projected 52 by the end of 2015. CityMD locations specialize in urgent care, providing immediate and affordable medical care for people

of all ages. Though Dr. Park does not intend to remain CEO since he does not have his Masters in Business Administration, he wants to use his current position to properly communicate and establish a mission statement of serving people with kindness. “The company you create, anything you create, is your artwork. It is a reflection of who you are and your values,” he said. Dr. Park recounted his experience with a patient who came into the CityMD in Astoria in excruciating pain, delaying his treatment since he did not have health insurance. CityMD treated the patient free of charge, and he left smiling. “For a few minutes, by saying the procedure was on the house, the world wasn’t broken, and that’s what we all have to do, just spread kindness. Life is tough enough; [we should] make it a little bit easier for someone else,” Dr. Park said. “We didn’t solve any long-term problems here. But for a minute, everything was okay.” He went on to explain his philosophy of serving others as crucial to a prosperous career. Dr. Park referenced numerous instances in which the charity of others helped him when he was struggling. Upon renting the first office of CityMD, Dr. Park applied for bankruptcy, until the landowner of the building and now close friend Al Glick, gave him a $300,000 loan, in order to help keep the business afloat. However, he acknowledged that

revenue must exist in order for CityMD to succeed in the long-term. As an example, he mentioned the creation of the Jackson Heights’ CityMD location, which originally had lost $3,000,000. A result of dedication and hard work, the location is now able to sustain itself and contribute to the revenue of the company. Dr. Park explained the growth of CityMD as a combination of timing, luck, and good partners. His passion for his work was a large factor as well. Dedication to his company led to expansion and success, even through hardship. “The only way you can do that, to go the extra mile, is because you love something,” he said. Park hopes that his lecture provided an eye-opening experience for students. “It was an opportunity to share the struggles I had growing up and to encourage [students] to have the correct mission and goals in life. People aren’t motivated correctly. This lecture was a reminder to the students as well as myself,” Dr. Park said. The Pre-Medical Society feels that Dr. Park accomplished this goal. “Dr. Park’s message conveyed that CityMD is successful because it appreciates and cares for people, serves them instead of taking from them,” Gotlieb said. “Dr. Park wants all prospective doctors to go into the medical field having a love for people and the intention to perpetuate kindness, even in the simple acts of our daily routines.”

Election Day Used For Inter-school Professional Development By Greg Huang and Vanna Mavromatis While students had the day off on Tuesday, November 3 for Election Day, teachers from Stuyvesant and three other specialized high schools met for inter-school professional development meetings. Each department within Stuyvesant took part in a distinct professional development session either within the Stuyvesant building or at another school. Professional development aims to regularly improve the teaching and administrative strategy of both new and experienced teachers. According to the Department of Education’s website, “[Professional development is] designed to improve the quality of classroom instruction, enable individuals to grow professionally, introduce practitioners to the practical applications of research-validated strategies, and help teachers meet their license and salary differentials.” Professional development can take multiple forms. Intra-school professional development, which is only for Stuyvesant teachers, occurs weekly, while inter-school professional development sessions are held only four times per year. Intra-school professional development often focuses on Stuyvesant-specific issues, including writing college recommendations and operating eSchoolData and Naviance. Branching outside of Stuyvesant allowed for an opportunity for teacher networking and exchange of department-specific ideas. “[We were] able to see colleagues [outside of the school and] to make contacts for the future,” computer science teacher Peter Brooks said. “It was a [collection] of computer science teachers, [which] is unusual.” The formats of these two professional development forms also differ. Intra-school professional development involves staff members who know each

other personally and is more focused on teachers sharing their individual teaching experiences. Inter-school professional development, on the other hand, involves presentations by specialists, many of whom have PhDs. Inter-school professional development days are also less interactive than intra-school professional development days, according to French teacher Manuel Ramirez. This year marked the creation of the Specialized High School Professional Development Alliance. Brooklyn Technical High School, Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts hosted professional development sessions for teachers and staff of all nine specialized high schools. “Teachers who work in similar schools [and] teach similar students have a lot to share [and] to offer,” Principal Jie Zhang said. Stuyvesant hosted the health and physical education and English department sessions for the Specialized High School Professional Development Alliance, and a citywide meeting for Math Team coaches. Meanwhile, the rest of the mathematics department and a part of the computer science department met at Brooklyn Technical High School. The rest of the computer science department as well as the biology, chemistry, and physics departments met at Bronx Science. The foreign language department met at New York University, while the art and music department met at Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Each session included speeches, activities, and teaching sessions geared toward the specific department. “This was one of the more beneficial professional developments,” athletic director and physical education teacher Christopher Galano said. “[Sessions are] not often geared toward phys ed because it’s such a special part of education [but] this one was specific to phys ed.” The physical education department held

one and a half-hour sessions on rollerblading, spinning and implementing spinning in other schools, and orienteering, and the Fitnessgram. Teachers attended three of the four cycles. For the foreign language department, professional development lasted six hours, and consisted of presentations in the morning, followed by group discussions and reflection in the afternoon, in which teachers discussed how they planned to implement what they learned in the presentations in their own teaching. There were two presenters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an association that studies the Spanish Civil War and collects artifacts and oral histories in its studies. They spoke about archiving, interviewing people who remember past events, and the importance of historical events. The teaching sessions are usually led by Stuyvesant teachers. “One thing that was particularly gratifying to me was walking from room to room […] and watching the Stuyvesant teachers lead so well,” Assistant Principal of English Eric Grossman said. “Managing colleagues […] requires skill and sensitivity.” There is also often an outside speaker at the sessions. For the English department, this was Nicole Wallack, director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University. Wallack gave a lecture about the essay as a genre of writing. “Her specialty was the essay, which I think can sound like a dull topic,” Grossman said. “But in fact she was provocative [and] funny, and challenged us in the best possible ways.” Math Team coaches also met and spoke at Stuyvesant. One speaker was Ashvin Jaishankar, the head coach of Stuyvesant’s Math Team, who spoke about geometry problems on math contests. Another speaker was David Hankin, a former mathematics assistant principal at Hunter who has written many Math Team problems

and often contributes to math journals. His talk was about expressions containing the roots of polynomials, and how they relate to Vieta’s theorem. “[The meeting] was a lot of fun,” mathematics teacher Debbie Goldberg said. “[We learned] other interesting ways to solve [problems].” Some professional development sessions examined course curricula. The technology department focused on the curriculum of the technical drawing course. They discussed techniques to teach computer drawing more effectively and to make the course more stimulating. They also reviewed the timeline of the curriculum. The goal of the department is to minimize starting time with the CAD software, which will lead to a higher learner curve. Other sessions addressed departmental needs more generally. “[The computer science departments spoke about] the different kinds of programs, classes, [difficulty] levels, and problems,” Brooks said. Some professional developments included hands-on activities as well. Some biology teachers worked in the “Bio Bus,” a 1970s MTA Bus that was transformed into travelling laboratory. Biology teachers learned how to identify aquatic invertebrate organisms using genotyping and microscopy. Sessions also aimed to align schools with updates to standardized tests. Various Advanced Placement (AP) teachers in the social studies department attended workshops at A. Philip Randolph High School to learn about changes to AP curriculums and exams. Professional development helped the programming departments of different schools to become acquainted with school software. They took a closer look at eSchoolData, the data management and communication software that replaced Stuyvesant’s old program, Daedalus (or “Student Tools”). They also learned about

the programming software STARS, whose functionality was previously incorporated very well in Daedalus but which the programming department has had to start interacting with more since the switch to eSchoolData. Though productive, inter-school professional development required a lot of planning. “[It required] months and months of planning,” Zhang said. This is due to the scale of the sessions and the fact that multiple schools were involved. Workshops and speakers for department needed to be organized. Several teachers and administrators put in effort to make the professional development sessions productive. “It was a big success in part because of the work that my teachers and I [as well as] teachers and supervisors from the other schools did preparing for it,” Grossman said. “I spent a lot of my time here during the last few weeks making sure that it went well.” For many teachers, however, the effort is worth it, as it gave teachers new materials to bring back to their classrooms. Biology teacher Jessica Quenzer intends to use the methods she learned in the “Bio Bus” in the Stuyvesant laboratory. “I would like to use those methods to identify some organisms in my bio[logy] classes, such as [Biological] Lab Techniques or Research Bio[logy],” she said. “Recently, my [Biological] Lab Techniques class did find aquatics in their setups that weren’t supposed to be there, so we’re trying to identify what they are.” Several Spanish teachers began teaching about the Spanish Civil War in their classes after attending the professional development session. Ramirez plans to bring some French propaganda posters from World War II to his lessons. “It was very educational, fun, and very interesting,” Ramirez said. “[I came] away feeling as if I learned something [that] I [could] take to my classroom to be an even better teacher.”