CCSU Students
Lisa Ptak - Dedicated, Focused, and Born to Teach
By
the time she was a junior at Crosby High School in Waterbury, Lisa Ptak
was certain she wanted to be a history teacher. Knowing of her
aspirations, three members of the history department at the school
devised an unprecedented experiment for Ptak during her senior year:
She was to teach four class periods, each with a different group of
freshmen. Joseph Macary, one of the teachers, says that the feeling
among the three colleagues was: “We’ve got a great student here—let’s
let her learn.”
After reviewing the
material to be covered and receiving a bit of instruction for how to
develop a lesson plan, Ptak prepared her notes and maps and taught,
over the course of a
couple of weeks, one honors-level history class, one remedial class,
and two regular sections. A lot of lessons were learned, and not just
by the freshmen. Admits Ptak, “It was definitely a lot harder than I
thought it would be.” Not surprising to her teachers, however, was the
fact that Ptak did a great job. Macary, who is now supervisor of social
studies for the district, says, “She’s dedicated, she’s focused, and
she has a lot of patience. She was born to teach.”
Ptak,
a CCSU sophomore, is enrolled in the Honors Program and is preparing to
enter the Teacher Education Program. A history major, she has a real
passion for her discipline. The value of studying history, she notes,
is that we can learn from past mistakes to create a better future.
“It’s not about memorizing dates,” she says. “It’s understanding causes
and effects—and that’s what’s interesting to me.” Associate Professor
of History Glenn Sunshine, who taught Ptak in a historical methods
course, says that she has the intelligence and the skills to be an
excellent historian. He states, “She does two things very well: she
learns what others are saying and she forms her own independent
judgment.”
In one key assignment for
Sunshine’s course, Ptak used transcriptions of court documents as
primary sources for an investigation into the witch trials in Geneva
during the Reformation. Geneva’s witch-hunting followed a historically
different pattern from other places, notes Sunshine. The way that Ptak
linked that fact to the theology of reformer John Calvin was, he says,
not only “elegant and convincing,” but also original and perhaps even
publishable.
In addition to distinguishing herself in academic work that furthers
her teaching aspirations, Ptak has capitalized on opportunities for
experiential learning. During the summer, Ptak has worked as a camp
counselor for the Parks and Recreation Department of the City of
Waterbury, and during semester breaks she volunteers at the elementary
school she attended as a child. She never knows which grade or class
she’ll be sent to assist, and she has enjoyed gaining broad insight
into the curricula of young students.
Since her first semester at CCSU, Ptak has also worked for the Alumni
Association’s phonathons, turning the task of raising money for her
university into an opportunity to learn from dozens of current and
former teachers who have benefited from CCSU’s programs. Where and what
do you teach, she asks. What kinds of methods work for that subject
matter? Says Ptak, “I love getting advice.”
Ptak’s ultimate goal, in fact, is to not only seek more advice from her
old mentors at Crosby High, but also to join them as a colleague. “I
feel at home when I go back,” she says. “It’s a special kind of
community at Crosby.”
She also points out that suburban schools and urban schools like those
in Waterbury are “two different worlds. I know the types of kids and
maybe I can get to them better than somebody who’s never had an
experience in an urban setting.”
She says she’d like to model herself on the teachers at Crosby in part
because of their support for and commitment to their students both in
and out of the classroom. “A lot of the teachers at my school really
invested in their students. Seeing that made me want to be a teacher
more,” she says. “I know I’d want to make a difference.”
— Leslie Virostek
