Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox.Rayhan Ahmed, a Brooklyn high school chemistry and environmental science teacher, knows that the human brain is wired to care about people and their stories, not formulas and equations.That’s why at Gotham Professional Arts Academy High School, where he’s spent the past eight out of his 22 years teaching, he created a curriculum for his ninth and 10th graders that is attached to human experiences and rooted in fieldwork and field trips focused on critical social and environmental issues. It explores topics such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (known as PFAS) contamination, and nuclear energy.“Absolutely, my students run experiments on corrosive inhibitors, analyze data, and write scientific papers,” Ahmed said. “But that learning became deeper when we went to Flint to hear people describe waking up early to stand in line for bottled water. It wasn’t abstract any more because there were faces and stories attached to the chemistry.”(Since his school is part of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, where students complete performance-based assessments instead of taking Regents exams, Ahmed has been able to create his own project-based learning curriculum.)Ahmed was one of six grand prize winners for this year’s prestigious FLAG Award for Teaching Excellence, which comes with a $25,000 cash prize for the winning teacher and a $10,000 grant for their school. He plans to use the money to take the 14 kids in his advisory “crew” that he’s been with for four years hiking in the mountains. (He’ll also use it for a family road trip, visiting as many major league baseball ballparks as possible this summer.)But even this award-winning teacher is worried about the encroachment of artificial intelligence and how it’s affecting the prompt he uses as the heart of his classroom: “What do you do with an idea?” “What I’m seeing now is that students are using AI to bypass the intellectual and emotional struggle of learning that is required to address this question,” he said. “This is really forcing me to ask what learning is for. What is the kind of learning that I’m trying to protect and what kinds of people am I hoping my students become?”This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.How and when did you decide to become a teacher? For years, I told myself a pretty simple story about how I became a teacher. It was just a temporary job that I’d do for a couple of years, get some experience, and head off to graduate school and move on with my life. It turns out that wasn’t the story. My first teaching job was in the Eight-Plus Program in the South Bronx, where I taught math and science to 15- to 17-year-old kids who were too old to be in eighth grade but had not met the promotional criteria for high school. The recruiter placed me at the site because “they needed the bodies.” He said “most teachers didn’t make it until Thanksgiving.” (Side note: He was wrong because two teachers left after Christmas!) In my time there, I saw grit, humor, resilience, and intelligence. These students carried more on their shoulders than I did as a recent college grad! I ultimately did leave for graduate school. I mostly did research in a lab, and I deeply missed being around teenagers every day. A couple of years in, I was at a conference about protein folding and my phone rang. My former student was stuck on quadratic equations. I stepped outside, found a quiet spot in the woods, and we worked through the problem together. This call reminded me where I belonged. So I came back into the classroom.Tell us about the curriculum you’ve developed, and why you decided to create it. What excites me most is creating opportunities for my students to do work that matters to them, their communities, and to the world around them and to see what happens when we trust young people with real work. One year I had a group of students concerned about the environmental and health impacts of fracking. They analyzed scientific evidence, designed experiments, interviewed experts, wrote policy recommendations, and eventually traveled to Washington, D.C., to present their findings to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office. Not long afterward, New York enacted a historic ban on fracking! What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why? My favorite “lesson” is really when my students realize their work matters beyond the classroom. In my ninth-grade environmental science class, I teach an expedition on PFAS, which are what are commonly called “forever chemicals.” Here, students start out thinking that they are doing just a regular chemistry class, with labs where all the answers are known. But pretty quickly, they’ve come up with questions about their water, communities, and the consequences of PFAS in their lives that I can’t answer. No one can just yet. We were at Hudson Yards doing a PFAS community assessment survey and happened to run into Stienjte Vanveldhoven, minister of climate policy and green growth of the Netherlands, who told my students about her international work with PFAS and how she called on the European Union to restrict all PFAS, except for uses of the chemicals deemed essential. Now, they’ve got more questions. Before they know it, we’re headed to Dartmouth to talk to Professor Celia Chan, an expert in PFAS. And I’m on a call with Reyhan Mehran, a regional resource coordinator at NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, about using Jamaica Bay as a potential research site and offering practical support to make it happen. (Toshiba awarded us a $10,000 grant to study this!) And now they are thinking they are capable of contributing to problems adults haven’t solved yet! You brought the first AP course to your school. Why was that so important? One of the Peloton instructors I like to ride with always says, “The most powerful thing anyone can say to us is what we say to ourselves.” At Gotham, I’ve worked with the guidance team to expand those stories. Over the last eight years, we’ve taken kids on overnight college visits. Over a student’s four years at Gotham, they’ve visited more than 25 campuses, from local schools to places like Dartmouth, Cornell, and Williams. Our seniors take a hybrid college course with Williams. We’ve organized our annual College March, where our entire school community celebrates graduating seniors and their postsecondary plans. This year, two of my advisees are attending Smith and Hobart and William Smith on full scholarships. Another student is on track to join UA Local 1 ( the plumbers union). The label “Advanced Placement” is another way of sending the message to students to see themselves differently. For many of our students, especially first-generation college-bound students, that message is really powerful. Is your educational experience connected to why you mentor early career educators through the NYC Men Teach program (which aims to get more men of color into teaching)? My parents are immigrants to this country. I grew up in Astoria, Queens, and went to New York City public schools, including going to high school at Brooklyn Tech. Tech is a huge school with large classes and it’s easy to get lost, but for students, like me, who thrived there, it opens tremendous opportunities and a pathway to the middle class. It’s important to me that schools are places of opportunity for our students, including opportunities to learn and grow, to interact with ideas and people that are new and different. Part of that is having a diverse teaching workforce that is reflective of the student population. That belief is connected to why I mentored early-career educators through NYC Men Teach. Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.
