The Transcript
It’s the highlight of every education major’s undergrad experience: that moment when you embark on student teaching. Leading a classroom being responsible for creating lesson plans, teaching, and grading offers teachers-in-training valuable experience and prepares them for their first real classroom.
But none of the seniors enrolled in BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development could have imagined what it would be like to begin their careers in the middle of a pandemic.
For math education major Sarina Simon (Wheelock’21), teaching three sections of math at Malden High School has meant working out of her apartment for most of the semester. She recently began teaching in a hybrid model: four days a week in person and one day a week of remote teaching and learning. Fellow math education major Emma Lincoln (Wheelock’21) has been teaching in person at Framingham High School in a hybrid model that allows for no more than five students in class (
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In spring 2015, Graham Grail, then a sophomore at Boston University, approached one of his professors with an idea. One day after class, he walked up to Carolyn Hodges-Simeon’s podium and explained that he wanted to research voice, specifically how it changes in transgender men who take testosterone. Hodges-Simeon, a biological anthropologist who researches sex differences in speech and the voice, was immediately on board.
“I was very surprised to see that at the time there was so little research in this area, and it got me thinking, how do physicians know the proper dosage? How do people starting testosterone therapy know what to expect?” says Hodges-Simeon, a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of anthropology.
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In mid-March, after Boston Prep’s administration decided to close the 6–12 charter public school and move classes online because of COVID-19, Julie Duran and a team of teachers began assembling a makeshift warehouse in the school cafeteria. From it, they doled out Chromebook laptops to every student most from low-income communities in Boston’s Hyde Park, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan neighborhoods. That was only the start. For students who didn’t have internet access at home, the school arranged for wireless hotspots or paid lapsed bills. It also provided breakfasts and lunches to students and their families not just in the spring, but throughout the summer, too. And when they learned that parents who’d lost their jobs weren’t able to pay bills or buy groceries, the school established a family fund to help pay for utilities, food, medical expenses, and more. They are continuing these efforts this school year.
When the
New York Times published a widely read, two-partexposé of labor abuse and poor working conditions at New York City-area nail salons in 2015, Diana Ceballos was part of a team of occupational health experts called upon by the state Department of Health to assess salon working environments and nail technicians’ exposure to unsafe chemicals.
As a chemical engineer with a PhD in environmental and occupational hygiene, Ceballos was working at the time as an industrial hygienist for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), where she measured and analyzed the impact of workplace hazards on workers’ health which is one of the federal agencies within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).