Let’s just say you have a family you love and a highly successful, non-teaching career – like financial services. You’re happy in your life choices, but you’ve always harbored fantasies of stepping into a classroom, your chalk and attendance chart in hand, and making a difference in young people’s lives.
Do you:
A: Wait until retirement to dust off your Dead Poets Society dreams.
B: Abandon your current life for unknown adventures with Teach for America.
C: Have it all! On your own time, right here in NYC.
Steve Blum is mobbed by adoring 2nd graders
Meet Steve Blum, the man who chose option C. A Yale alumnus, championship fencer and father of two grown children, Steve is a Managing Director at Burnham Securities. He found us last year at the Yale not-for-profit fair, where he confessed to a lifelong love for education, fond memories of bringing math to life for his own kids and, like many professionals in other fields, an interest in picking up teaching as a second career “someday.” When we told him we could place him in a classroom as a volunteer – for as many hours during the week as he might be able to give us – he jumped at the opportunity to stretch his teaching wings without chucking his current life. “That is really the moment I realized that there was a different path that is not full-time teaching but that would provide an outlet for those needs,” he says.