PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENT IS IN CLASSROOM.Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY Dennis McCarthy may refer to:
You could hear a pin drop as Steven Politis stepped to the blackboard Thursday morning and began to write out an algebra problem in chalk. The eight boys -- all fifth-graders -- in this special math class at Welby Way Elementary School elementary school: see school. didn't say a word. They just put their heads down heads down - [Sun] Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also hack mode and larval stage, although this mode is hardly confined to fledgling hackers. and went to work. "Anyone have the answer yet?" Politis asked the boys, all about 10 years old, a few minutes later. Eight hands shot up. Politis smiled and put down his chalk. "Maybe we should just move on to geometry," the 91-year-old teacher said, giving them a wink. Politis comes twice a week to teach pre-algebra classes to the eight smartest math students in this Canoga Park elementary school. He says he does it because he wants to pay the school back for giving his three grandchildren a great education. That's his cover story, at least. The truth is Politis has been paying back the whole country since he walked out of Stuyvesant High School Stuyvesant High School, commonly referred to as Stuy, is a New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science. The school opened in 1904 on Manhattan's East Side and moved to a new building in Battery Park City in 1992. in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. -- in the middle of the Great Depression -- and put that beautiful mind of his to work. He had the grades to go to the best schools in the country, but only the money to go to City College of New York “City College” redirects here. For other uses, see City College (disambiguation). CCNY was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States[3] . "I was lucky enough to have Ph.D.s teaching me in high school and at CCNY CCNY City College of New York (obsolete) CCNY Collector's Club of New York (philatelic group) because better jobs were hard for them to come by during the Depression," Politis says. "I went to school at night and made radio sets in a shop for $9 a week during the day. I was lucky to have that." When Uncle Sam Uncle Sam, name used to designate the U.S. government. The term arose in the War of 1812 and seems at first to have been used derisively by those opposed to the war. Possibly it was an expansion of the letters "U.S. called in 1941, Politis joined the Signal Corps. He was a radar man in a B-17 bomber that was shot down over Croatia in 1944. "John Wayne bails out and lands in the arms of a beautiful woman. I bail out and land in a tree, bleeding," he says, laughing. "The local underground hid us for four days, then took us in a fishing boat to a little island offshore where we were reunited with our troops at a landing strip we had there." After the war, there wasn't much work for the Signal Corps, so Politis took his beautiful mind to the private defense industry and helped develop guidance-missile systems used in nuclear submarines. He remembers exactly where he was the day President John F. Kennedy "John Kennedy" and "JFK" redirect here. For other uses, see John Kennedy (disambiguation) and JFK (disambiguation). John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917–November 22, 1963), was the thirty-fifth President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in was assassinated as·sas·si·nate tr.v. as·sas·si·nat·ed, as·sas·si·nat·ing, as·sas·si·nates 1. To murder (a prominent person) by surprise attack, as for political reasons. 2. : working on the country's moon-shot program at Northrop Corp., figuring out an experiment package for our astronauts to carry out on the lunar surface after they landed on the moon. "After they jumped up and down, hit a golf ball and planted the flag, they went out and deployed the experiments we designed." They monitored radiation on the moon, wind velocity, temperatures and much more -- vital information brought back to Earth. When Politis retired from Lockheed in 1982, he was developing anti-submarine, sonar-detection equipment for U.S. aircraft. He figured at 65 he was through paying back his country, but he was only starting. He met Sister Francis Halloran from St. Genevieve's School in Panorama City. "She was looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. a math teacher. I had two engineering degrees and a doctorate, but I didn't have a teaching credential. She didn't care. She said she had prayed on it, and I was the one. "Those were the most rewarding, best years of my life, teaching lower- to middle-class students in seventh through ninth grades struggling in math." By the time he left St. Gen's five years later to take on a special project for the Los Angeles Unified School District The Los Angeles Unified School District (the "LAUSD") is the largest (in terms of number of students) public school system in California and the second-largest in the United States. Only the New York City Department of Education has a larger student population. , six of his students had become National Merit Scholarship finalists. Politis had fought a war for his country, helped bring back vital information from the moon and built highly technical defense systems, but getting those kids to National Merit finalists was one of the things that made him proudest, he says. But the LAUSD LAUSD Los Angeles Unified School District (Los Angeles, CA) needed him for that special project. Not all the district's math teachers were up to snuff, so it was decided that the district needed a super math teacher to help other math teachers with their trigonometry trigonometry [Gr.,=measurement of triangles], a specialized area of geometry concerned with the properties of and relations among the parts of a triangle. Spherical trigonometry is concerned with the study of triangles on the surface of a sphere rather than in the . Politis was drafted back into duty for a few more years. And now, at age 91, he's back in the classroom for the third straight year, teaching the best and the brightest, who he thinks often get overlooked in our school system. "We have a tendency not to do enough for the really bright kids, and that's wrong. If we're going to keep doing things better than the rest of the world, we need these kids." This year, his class happens to be all boys. Girls were in the magnet math class the previous two years. "It's amazing to watch him teach because he interacts with the kids, not just talks to the blackboard," says Adria Metson, magnet coordinator at Welby Way. She asked Politis to help out when the former volunteer teaching this class had to retire because he got too old. He was in his early 80s. The thing is, say Jake King, Mark Guberman, Ethan Waldman and the other boys in this class, they're learning more than just algebra from Mr. Politis. "He's teaching us history, too," says Sonnath Ganapa. That he is. Steven Politis -- still using that beautiful mind of his to pay the country back. dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com, 818-713-3749 CAPTION(S): photo Photo: Steven Politis, 91, volunteers as a pre-algebra teacher for a group of outstanding math students at Welby Way Elementary School in Canoga Park. |
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