Dear Incoming Faculty of 2026, WE ARE EXCITED TO HAVE YOU!

Every September, Stuyvesant students shuffle into new classrooms, upperclassmen reunite after months apart, and a new class enters the building. However, freshmen aren’t the only ones navigating Stuyvesant’s 10 stories. Every year, a new group of teachers joins Stuyvesant, slowly learning where everything is. Welcome, or welcome back, Stuyvesant’s newest teachers! 

Michael Summer, Honors Physics

Physics teacher Michael Summer brings a decade and a half of experience in education to Stuyvesant. Summer began his career teaching SAT classes throughout the five boroughs of New York City before moving into the classroom full-time. Since then, he has taught at several charter schools, Xaverian High School in Bay Ridge, and Maspeth High School in Elmhurst. Summer has taught other technical subjects, such as Algebra I, Algebra II, and Calculus, and he has spent the past four years teaching physics. 

For Summer, the appeal of physics lies in its ability to unite mathematical reasoning with direct observation of the world around us. “I love that it combines mathematics and science together in this really beautiful way, as well as general problem solving,” Summer explained. He also appreciates that physics is quite tangible for students. “They’re able to see with their own eyes what we’re studying,” he said. “It’s naturally a very inclusive subject to teach. It’s observable.”

Summer takes advantage of the power of observation in his lessons. He describes his approach as inquiry-based, encouraging students to begin with a phenomenon in the natural world and gradually reason their way toward an explanation. “Often we’re starting with a demonstration, observation, making hypotheses about why we’re seeing what we’re seeing based on what we’ve been learning,” Summer explained. From there, students work toward “getting to the heart of the phenomenon” before extrapolating and applying what they have learned through problem sets.

Summer also wants to encourage his students to take intellectual risks. “I’m interested in creating an inclusive classroom environment where people feel free to make mistakes and work well with each other,” he said. He hopes to help students feel comfortable asking questions and challenging themselves while developing their problem-solving skills.

Outside of school, Summer plays the saxophone, which he brings to class every year during the waves unit to demonstrate topics like the harmonic series. In addition to music, he also enjoys basketball, biking, camping, backpacking, and, more recently, disc golf. In addition, Summer has also entered a new stage of his life as the father of a three-month-old baby.

Dr. Kenneth Baron, Algebra II and AP Precalculus

Dr. Baron is no stranger to Stuyvesant: he grew up in New York City and attended the school himself. Before coming to teach at Stuyvesant, Dr. Baron spent roughly five years teaching part-time with Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM). “I’ve been teaching for about five years now, part-time, and I’ve mostly been teaching with an organization called BEAM that works with kids from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods around New York City, and doing enrichment math with them over the summer and on Saturdays as well,” he shared. He has also taught statistics at The City College of New York and a class for Math for America. Although Stuyvesant is Dr. Baron’s first full-time teaching job, rather than a return, it feels more like a new beginning. “It’s a nice full circle moment coming back to teach where I went to school many years ago,” he said. 

Dr. Baron’s path to teaching wasn’t always a clear one. He holds a PhD in statistics and spent years working in quantitative finance before making the switch to teaching. “I studied math and statistics in college and graduate school, and really loved using those subjects,” he explained. “Then, working in finance for a bunch of years, I worked in a field called quantitative finance, where you use math and statistics very heavily to make investment decisions.” Dr. Baron began to teach because he wanted to share what his years of experience taught him: “Joining Stuyvesant and helping to communicate my love of math and how it has a lot of real-world applications is really one of the reasons I’m excited about being here.”

Within his classroom, his philosophy begins with a single premise: “Math is not a spectator sport,” he said. “When we’re sitting on the couch watching the U.S. Open or soccer, it’s very easy to enjoy what’s going on. For math, you really need to get into it and do it.” Rather than lecturing during his classes, he structures his lessons into three parts. “Often there’s a ‘try now.’ Kids come in and work to solve a problem, and then they come to the boards, and we go over how they solved it,” he described. “And then typically, I’ll build on that knowledge and problem-solving skills, and introduce a few concepts.” Finally, he wraps up the lesson with a problem that pulls everything together.

Baron is also aware of the variety of students in his classroom. “A lot of Stuy kids love math, but a lot of Stuy kids also have some mixed feelings on math,” he said. He wants to make sure both can succeed in his class. “The kids who are excited about math, I want to get them more excited, and the kids who are maybe less excited, get them to see some of the beauty in math and the fact that we’re all doers of mathematics. It’s not just the kid who’s the number one kid on the math team. We can all really be good at math.”

Outside of school, Dr. Baron lives on the Upper West Side with his wife and two kids, and enjoys spending his weekends running in Central Park. He is also a passionate defender of New York City barbecue. “People think, like, oh, it’s not the south; they don’t know anything about barbecue. There’s very good barbecue in New York City,” he proclaimed. 

Luke Reifenberg, Euclidean Geometry and Algebra II

Math teacher Luke Reifenberg has taught in a wide variety of settings. After college, he served in the Peace Corps, teaching English in a rural village in Cambodia. He later taught at his old high school, where he filled in for all sorts of classes, from calculus and biology to chemistry and Spanish. Reifenberg then moved to New York to pursue a master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, and has since taught at Williamsburg High School of Art and Technology and Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences. After moving between schools frequently, he hopes Stuyvesant will become a more permanent home. “Here it’s such a wonderful place that it would be nice to finally grow some roots,” Reifenberg said.

Reifenberg works to be the exciting teacher he had had earlier in life. In high school, he saw math largely as a set of procedures and formulas handed down to students. It was only after he took a formal logic class in college that he began to see mathematics as something special built through reasoning and discovery. “I was hooked,” Reifenberg recalled. “I was like, oh, actually there’s something very interesting here—something worthwhile to spend a lifetime trying to figure out.”

Now, as a teacher, Reifenberg hopes to help his students find that same perspective. “Math at its heart is a playful and creative endeavor,” he explained. Rather than simply introducing a formula and telling students to apply it, Reifenberg tries to show why and how mathematical ideas arose in the first place. “We’re human beings. What we absorb are stories more than just cold facts,” he said. By presenting math as a discovery to be made, Reifenberg hopes students can find satisfaction in struggling with a difficult idea and eventually making sense of it.

Stuyvesant’s engaged student body was one of the main reasons Reifenberg wanted to teach at the school. “They’re a curious bunch,” he said. “They have good questions. They really care.” He hopes that that enthusiasm will help students see math as more than just a subject they get a grade for. Instead, he wants them to appreciate its patterns, history, and beauty.

Apart from the classroom, Reifenberg enjoys biking, meditating, and baking. He lived in Santiago, Chile from ages two to 10 and attended school entirely in Spanish there. This summer, he traveled to Cambodia and Vietnam, where he biked the Ha Giang Loop and visited Phong Nha and Ha Long Bay.

Fiona Mullen, Health

Health teacher Fiona Mullen arrives at Stuyvesant with a clear mission and an athletic background to match. Mullen is a native New Yorker, and she began her college career at Pace University on a full basketball scholarship before transferring to SUNY Cortland, where she continued to play basketball and earn a degree in physical education. Later, she completed her master’s degree in public health sciences and health education at Touro University Worldwide.

Before teaching at Stuyvesant, Mullen had extensive experience teaching both in and out of the New York City Department of Education (DOE) as both a health and physical education teacher. “I taught at New Rochelle High School in Westchester,” she shared. “And then I taught last year, my first year in the New York City DOE, in Frederick Douglass Academy up in West Harlem.”

Teaching health has always been one of Mullen’s passions. “I grew up being very sports-oriented, physical wellness-oriented, so that was a huge driver for me.” Additionally, she emphasizes the importance of health education. “Health is an underappreciated subject in terms of importance,” she said. “It may not be chemistry or physics, but health comes first, and if you’re not healthy, then nothing else can fall into place.” Mullen finds that health education in the classroom is the foundation for students to have a healthy and happy life. “It’s really important to teach students coping skills and just how to live healthily in order to be able to chase their dreams and do other things that are important.”

That philosophy is how she structures her class. “[Health] is a skills-based course,” she explained. “While there are things to be memorized, it’s helping students discover practical ways to live better and live healthier.” A typical lesson starts with a do-now, then moves through a short mini-lesson, and the rest of the lesson is group work and hands-on activities. “Most of the period should be student interaction,” she said. Additionally, Mullen is aware and deliberate about the subject’s serious topics. “There are some important topics and heavy topics in health, so it’s important to approach those with ease, but also open-mindedness.”

Stuyvesant’s academic reputation helped bring her to the school, but it wasn’t the only factor. “I definitely had heard of Stuyvesant from growing up,” she said. “I know that it is a super academically rigorous school, so that was something that drew me to it. But also, I love the diversity in terms of students’ learning styles. The staff is amazing. The location is beautiful. The sports programs are awesome.” Most importantly, she sees Stuyvesant as a place for her to grow. “I thought that it could really help me grow to be a better teacher to be around such bright young minds,” she explained. 

Outside of school, Mullen is currently training for a half marathon, learning the piano, and biking during her free time. She is also a big fan of stand-up comedy, and she has an elderly dog named Cooper that she loves dearly.

Robert Parker, Spanish II and Spanish III

Spanish teacher Robert Parker joins Stuyvesant with 17 years of experience teaching world languages in public high schools. He began his career in Northern Virginia and has taught both German and Spanish at every level, from introductory courses through AP. 

Parker describes his teaching style as organized but relatively laid-back, which he believes is really important in language classes. “You have to make sure that there’s an environment where people actually want to speak up,” he explained. Although his lessons vary from learning vocabulary and grammar to writing, projects, and presentations, he always emphasizes collaboration. “Language is never built in isolation,” Parker said. “Most of learning a language should be working with other people, especially if you don’t have an opportunity outside of the classroom to work with somebody to build those language skills.”

Parker’s interest in languages began with his high school German teacher. Though at first, he only took language classes to fulfill the graduation requirement, his teacher’s passion inspired him to continue. “She made me fall in love with it along the way, and so I want to hopefully do that for other students as well,” Parker said. Since then, he has also studied bits of Russian, Korean, and Mandarin, and is currently learning Greek on Duolingo in preparation for a friend’s wedding in Greece.

After spending the past eight years at smaller New York City high schools in Chelsea and then the Financial District, Parker was ready for a change. In the past, he’d always been the only language teacher at his schools, so joining Stuyvesant’s larger department was especially exciting. “I’m excited to be part of a real department again and to have colleagues to work with, to brainstorm with,” he said. Parker also hopes Stuyvesant students will push him to rethink his teaching. “It’s going to force me to think of new things and challenge people differently and challenge myself differently.”

Outside the classroom, Parker participates in a bowling league. Also, he studied in Iceland during college and has only ever driven stick-shift cars (rather than normal cars with automatic transmission). With his wide-ranging experiences and enthusiasm for language learning, Parker is excited to bring a fresh perspective to Stuyvesant’s language department.

Andrew Yim, Freshman Composition and American Literature

Before arriving at Stuyvesant, English teacher Andrew Yim taught everywhere from elementary schools to college classrooms and prisons. His career in education began while attending Vassar College, where a work-study job on a community-supported agriculture farm entailed taking children on tours and teaching them about science. “I never really expected to be a teacher, but I think just doing that made me a little more interested in it,” Yim explained. He later taught elementary school in New England for a couple of years and middle school in New York City before earning a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at the University of Wisconsin. There, he taught college students and volunteered to teach incarcerated men. Most recently, he taught at Gotham Professional Arts Academy in Brooklyn.

Yim’s background in poetry influences the way he teaches literature. Yim frequently pairs longer texts with supplemental poems or essays that help students understand connections between different writers and time periods. In American Literature, for example, he introduced Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me alongside Richard Wright’s poem of the same name and an essay by James Baldwin, allowing students to see an “artistic lineage.” He also incorporates creative writing into the class, sometimes through Creative Writing Fridays. “I don’t want literature to feel like something that someone else does. I want it to feel like something that my students do,” Yim said.

For Yim, literature is also very personal. Growing up, reading was one of the ways he spent time with his mother. She sometimes worked two or three jobs but still made time to read stories to him and his brother before bed. He hopes to give his students that same sense of being cared for and to help them develop empathy through literature. “If you are reading a story and all of a sudden you get stressed about what’s happened to the character, something is happening to your heart,” he reflected. “You are learning to feel as another person.”

Yim came to Stuyvesant because he wanted to continue growing as a teacher. “I didn’t want to just be fine in my job. I wanted to get better at teaching,” he said. Since arriving, he has especially appreciated the collaborative culture of the English department, where colleagues frequently share lessons and discuss teaching strategies.

In addition to being a teacher, Yim is also an author. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Yim is preparing to publish his first book and poetry collection, The Ninth Island, which comes out in February 2027. The collection explores Hawaii, his family’s experience with displacement, and the forces pushing residents off the islands. Its title refers to Las Vegas, which is sometimes called Hawaii’s ninth island because so many Hawaiians have been forced to relocate there.

Through both his teaching and writing, Yim hopes to help others see literature as a tool to connect people across different backgrounds.

Elizabeth Mae Burris-Wells, Foundations of Literature and American Literature

English teacher Elizabeth Mae Burris-Wells is relatively new to teaching, but her path to Stuyvesant has already taken her through many different teaching settings. After college, she spent a year working at a boarding school, where she lived with 26 teenage girls as a dorm parent while also teaching a health class. A few years later, Burris returned to complete a master’s program, which included student teaching at a small middle school near Lincoln Center and, last spring, at Stuyvesant.

Her experience at Stuyvesant made her eager to return. Burris appreciated being surrounded by teachers who shared her enthusiasm for literature. “I love the way the English department thinks about teaching,” she explained. “I feel like I’m around a bunch of really thoughtful teachers who care a lot about reading and writing.” She was also impressed by the enthusiasm of the freshmen she taught. “The willingness to learn, the excitement to learn, just made it so fun to teach,” she said.

Burris works to foster this kind of exploration in the classroom. She likes to leave room for students to make unexpected connections. “I’m interested in creating a space where the unexpected can come out,” she explained. Burris emphasized that this kind of openness still requires thought and intention. “Creating that space of possibility, that’s rigorous. It’s not just loosey-goosey,” she said. In a recent Foundations of Literature lesson on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, students selected lines representing change and rearranged them into poems of their own, producing very different results from the same set of ideas.

Burris’s interest in these possibilities is also what drew her to English. An avid writer herself, she sees reading and writing as ways to explore both oneself and the world. “I’ve always found a whole universe’s worth of meaning to be made and exploration to be done,” she said.

Outside the classroom, Burris enjoys making elaborate layer cakes, a hobby she picked up in high school. Though she bakes them less often now, she still makes them for friends’ birthdays or simply “to make the day feel special.”

Now back at Stuyvesant, Burris hopes to keep building the kind of environment that made her want to return in the first place.

Thomas McCarthy, Freshman Composition and Writing in the World

English teacher Thomas McCarthy is familiar with the halls of Stuyvesant, but this is a new start. McCarthy taught for Ms. Weller as a student teacher in spring of last year and then spent a year as an English teacher as a leave replacement. Now, McCarthy is officially part of the English Department. “I’m not replacing anybody. I’m my own teacher in the department,” McCarthy claimed. 

McCarthy’s road to teaching took a few turns. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 2019 as an English major, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. “I got a job at a fancy law firm in Midtown, and I didn’t like it at all. It was not for me,” McCarthy shared. During the pandemic, McCarthy worked as a paralegal before transitioning into teaching. In October 2021, McCarthy started teaching at the Achievement First Linden Middle School in East New York. “During that time, I realized that I really liked teaching, and I wanted to do it for the rest of my life,” McCarthy said. To become a teacher, McCarthy attended Teachers College, and he chose Stuyvesant to complete his mandatory student teaching. “I wanted the best teacher education I could find, and so I asked to be placed here for my student teaching semester.” Quickly, McCarthy knew Stuyvesant was the place for him. “I knew after a month of student teaching here that this place is great. I want to stay here for as long as I can,” he admitted. 

McCarthy currently teaches both freshmen and seniors, and the curricula for each class are very different. His freshmen classes rely on lesson plans shared across the English department. “One of my favorite things about working here is how regularly teachers share resources. It’s fantastic. It very much feels like everybody is collaborating and pulling in the same direction,” McCarthy said. His goal for freshmen is to acclimate them to Stuyvesant. “A lot of what we do in that class is like learning how to be high school English students.” In contrast, his approach for seniors is very different. “Seniors have one foot in Stuyvesant and one foot out the door, and my goal for seniors is to give them reading experiences that will be meaningful for them as they move into the next phase.” Ultimately, McCarthy wants all students to be successful, no matter where they currently stand. 

In every class, McCarthy wants to make students feel like part of a community. “English class, especially, is at its best when it is a community collaborative effort when everybody is pulling in the same direction and working together to read hard books,” he shared. “It’s really important to focus on the social aspect of reading.” McCarthy also appreciates Stuyvesant students specifically. “I can assign 20 to 30 pages of reading at home, and for the most part, kids will do it,” McCarthy acknowledged. “I feel really, really lucky that I’m able to do that here.” 

Outside of school, McCarthy plays pickup basketball, goes on runs around his neighborhood in Queens, and hopes to get better at cooking. McCarthy is also a devoted Yankees fan. “I’m really into the Yankees,” he added. “Aaron Judge is on the IL, but hopefully he will be back soon. They’re being shady about the calf strain.”

With backgrounds ranging from playing collegiate basketball to writing poetry about Hawaii, a new group of Stuyvesant teachers is settling into the building this fall, each of them with their own unique passions and experiences. Welcome to Stuyvesant!