A Muslim Student, A Jewish Teacher, A Little Light Peeking Through the Stereotypes

I was working as a second-grade teacher in a gritty section of the northeastern Bronx, in 2009, when I got stereotyped.

I had spent almost 20 years in corporate America and changed careers after 9/11 to become a teacher. I had started in Queens, then moved to the Bronx.

A fit of misguided idealism might have propelled me to enter teaching. I thought I could help educate children to embrace tolerance of others and avoid the stereotyping that wounds the nation and world.

So, what happens at my first parent conference? A student’s mother, of Hispanic heritage, walks in the door to meet me and says, “I love the Jews! They have so much money and they keep to themselves!”

I didn’t like being stereotyped. Teaching is not a job known for accruing wealth. My father was a struggling building contractor, my mother a hospital dietitian. We lived in a tract home. And why was it good for the Jews to keep to themselves?

I ignored the woman’s remarks to talk about her son’s academic performance.

My school was a virtual United Nations of children, with kids from Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Yemen, Kenya, and other countries. There were even a few students from that faraway planet known as Brooklyn.

At least 20 percent of the kids were Muslim and the majority of those seemed to be from Bangladesh. The neighborhood was filled with windowless warehouses, faceless storage units, bus depots, small factories, auto body shops and gated parking lots. This was a neighborhood most of the city didn’t know existed.

But kids are still kids. They were excited about just being alive. The students didn’t seem to notice their environment. They were happy and open to learning. Many of the Bengali students had parents who were extremely driven and pushed their children to learn and succeed.

One of my best students was a Bengali girl. Let’s call her Sunnia. Sunnia seemed to drink in books like they were water. I bought her a book on the Greek myths. It wasn’t in the second-grade curriculum, but I wanted to give this kid the chance to see new worlds and new stories.

I did the same with my other students, by starting an informal lending library in the classroom, buying age-appropriate books on the environment, the planets, Dr. Seuss, whatever I thought would grab their attention. I loved books and education, and I wanted my students to get the same enjoyment out of them that I did.

After the school year was over, Sunnia and I both moved on. I forgot about her, for the most part. I rarely saw her again and there were new children to teach.

During the pandemic, I decided to retire. I had put in 18 years as a teacher and the years had worn on me, with the onset of coronary artery disease one of the things persuading me to leave.

Upon retiring, not done with wanting to learn new things myself, I applied for a master’s degree at the City College of New York (CCNY) and was accepted into an English program.

Last year, in September 2022, I was waiting in the hallway for my class to begin, talking to another guy in the seminar. A young girl walking through the hallway, stopped in front of me, and said, “Mr. Gold?” in a way that seemed to ask, “What are you doing here?”

I smiled.

It was Sunnia. She had graduated high school and was in her first year at CCNY, studying computer engineering. She thanked me for buying her that book on the Greek myths and said it proved to be very useful during one of her English classes.

Sunnia told me about another student from our second-grade class, a boy of Hispanic heritage, whose father was a city bus driver, a boy I had helped with phonics issues. He was now a freshman at Manhattan College. Sunnia and the boy had gone to prom together.

I am lucky in a way many other teachers are not. I got to see the results of my teaching, years later. It validated my decision to become a teacher, in a small sense. My teaching life was a little refutation of the stereotyping too many of us engage in, when we see people not as real persons, but comic book constructions of nefarious traits.

If a Jewish teacher in New York can make a connection with a Muslim kid whose family came from the other side of the world, then maybe there is still a ray of tender sunlight offering us a way out of the dead end of stereotyping, intolerance, and hate.

If people from wildly different cultures can come together once for a meeting of the minds, it can happen again.