Encompassed is an oral history-style podcast series and interactive timeline exploring nearly eight decades of 77 years of Bronx Science alumni’s experiences. The interviews revolve around “encompassing moments"–experiences that both immersed the young student in discovery and, like a compass, provided direction for the next steps of his or her life. Listen to the first thirty conversations now, and keep an eye out for new episodes every month.
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Encompassed Bronx Science Podcasts
"Every year 6,000 people see the benefit of public education. Over 10 years, that's 60,000 people [...] You build a whole constituency of people who feel committed to public education. It would diminish our commitment if you closed the specialized schools. That question for me has long since been settled. We absolutely have to preserve them."…
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"Very few of my students end up becoming humanistic academics. But what I am hoping is that the kids I have in freshman humanities, who have to take it whether they like it or not, on some rainy day 25 or 30 years later when they're successful lawyers, whatever, and they're a little bored, take down one of those books that they for some reason save…
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"Probably 90% of the graduates from '71, by the time we graduated college, were committed to some kind of social change. We walked out of those colleges into a world we felt we had to make a change in some kind of way. The last thing on our mind was salaries, or income. It was all about what are we doing for the collective good."…
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"There was a healthy sense of competition, but at the same time I think there was a great sense of helping one another. That's the experience that I had."By Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories
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"You can go to Bronx Science and for a moment all other things are suspended. Afterward we'll split up and go where our footholds in society take us […] but there is that feeling of this amazing squad of students […] There are those kids coming out of Fieldston who have read Dostoyevsky and analyzed and I didn’t. But I got these experiences and the…
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“The class that saved me was Science Survey, which was the school paper, and Leonard Mannheim, who was the teacher of that class, was just superb […] He helped unlock my love of literature, which is something that has followed me for the rest of my life.”By Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories
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“Reading and rereading and rereading a poem causes it to change. That became my model in general–you know, you take the object and you try to study it. Because the kind of focus required to learn a poem was useful trying to understand my Halladay and Resnick Physics textbook, was useful for calculus, was useful for a lot of things.”…
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“Bronx Science shaped my life. It taught me that I could think critically, it taught me that I could hold my own with really smart people, it taught me that it’s ok to be different from everyone else […] I always kind of felt like an outsider, but I found my group, and we were all outsiders [...] I stole a doorknob from one of the classrooms, which…
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“I think there was a clear sense of entitlement and an arrogance that went along with myself and my peers in high school–there was a shrewdness and a hustle and I think that hopefully transformed into more leadership and responsibility–but I think overlooking the sense of entitlement and arrogance might be shortsighted.”…
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“Most of us were looking for a theoretical and political rationale for dealing with the world. Many of us came out conservative because as we argued our way through lots of facts and ideologies, […] it became clearer and clearer that The Great Society wasn’t working” […] By the time Reagan showed up, half the team had become Reaganite conservatives…
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“It’s a pretty special culture in Queens. For the Chinese American families I grew up around, there was a special coveted nature about these three schools. Every summer, it was sitting in a corporate classroom going through test prep materials […] I realized that I never really had a sense of independence, or the ability to do identity forming and …
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“Being at Bronx Science, we were afforded privileges that most other high school kids don’t have. We’re not being body scanned all the time, we’re not being suspended, we don’t have a school to prison pipeline. Simultaneously, though, how does it reflect our school if a kid is struggling and instead of being taught remedial classes or having extra …
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“One thing about being in pageants is that people think you might not be the brightest. And once I mentioned I went to Bronx Science, they’d be like ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ And I think that went a long way to show people you can be pretty and smart at the same time […] My platform during my reign was empowering youth through education. Because I had…
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“I’ve always really loved music […] A lot of the arts funding got cut when I was a junior so the band and orchestra and a bunch of groups were significantly reduced. I got cut from orchestra, and stopped playing […] That was always in the back of my mind […] We created this program called Building Beats, where we fund and provide music education fo…
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“I’m now the Associate Producer at the Public Theater in New York City […] and when I think about my mother growing up in the Dominican Republic with no medicine, the youngest of nine, or my dad growing up in rural Spain, tending cows, and then them coming over here and meeting at a church dance in Jackson Heights and then trying to make a new life…
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“I was definitely an overachiever, or maybe ‘was’ is the wrong word–I’m still going strong. It’s a funny thing to say in City Hall […] I knew that I never wanted to learn how to type, because I would end up in some sort of secretarial or clerical job. So I purposely took metal shop, which probably changed my life. First of all, I learned how to sol…
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"The lens through which I remember my Bronx Science experience is not necessarily through the lens of being denied any opportunities, institutionally speaking […] I don’t think a high school has the job of molding a complete and separate society, that breaks away from issues that are grounded in the real world. I think the best a high school can ho…
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“There was the joy of the insight of solving something. It came quite a bit in Math team […] There was usually some sort of very ugly, brute force way you could try to solve a problem, and then there was a really elegant way. I didn’t always find the elegant way but when I did, it brought me that same satisfaction […] My brain was already switching…
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“Dr. Maskin was a history teacher, who had a very unconventional approach which stuck with me, and sometimes I still think about it, because he had a way of weaving pop culture into the lesson plan. I forget exactly what we were learning, but it was about the Roman Empire. He played Tears for Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ and then was…
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“I experienced Bronx Science as an oasis of great conversation and imaginative inquiry. I don't remember ever feeling inhibited about asking basic questions. I also don’t remember actually doing any homework. I think we did it on the subway in the morning.”By Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories
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"Intellectual surroundings always felt comfortable for me because I knew I could do it. When I was a kid, I was nobody in particular, but when I started first grade in Antwerp, I surprised everybody, because all of a sudden, that little pipsqueak is the head of the class […]I was used to being among the best, and then I’m thrown in with a whole bun…
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“You can’t yearn for something you don’t even know exists. It wasn’t exactly like you’re in a brand new land, but you kind of were. You’re in a land of rarefied intelligence. That doesn’t mean every kid there is a genius, by no means, but even if you have no interest in physics you still had a good physics teacher. Being a teacher’s a little like b…
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“My bag was already packed up before the end of the last period. You know, I spent a lot of time lamenting my commute, but in the end looking back on it, you learn a lot about yourself. You learn about your study habits, you make friendships on those commutes, and you form bonds. You form a bond with the city that I think no other New York City sch…
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“At Science I met other guys who were really into music. We ended up jamming close to every day. One of the bands I was in played at the Apollo Amateur Hour. I remember one of my English teachers came to watch me, which was amazing. We didn’t know what to call ourselves, and when we were auditioning one of the judges was like, “I got a name for you…
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“It was very clear our teams would always get beaten by Clinton. Some things never change. I wonder if the chant we had is still used. It goes like: ‘Harass ‘em, harangue ‘em, make ‘em relinquish the ball.’ I guess you hadn’t heard that before.”By Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories
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“He let me adapt the books and, instead of writing a paper, make a short film. He was one of the few teachers who recognized that by focusing on film I wasn’t shying away from work–I was willing to do more work, but I just wanted to do the work that I wanted to do."By Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories
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"I think all my life I've judged people by how smart they are and how well they can communicate. I think Bronx Science gave me the first taste of that."By Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories
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"I had many students who didn’t come every day. I would call their mothers, only to find out they had a brother who was older and they had to share shoes or something like that. I grew up in not a wealthy family but this was beyond. And often I noticed these women were despondent, some of them had black eyes, and […] I discovered that [domestic abu…
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“There was a sense of freedom, like you could do what you want. You don’t realize it’s a freedom until you see other places that are not as free and don’t have that opportunity to step outside of your comfort zone and the opportunity to meet people from across your borough, beyond your borough, and really learn people and how to be around different…
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"There wasn’t a single female science teacher […] I remember my first plane geometry class, with a very attractive young teacher named Ms. Heinrich. She really had a lot of trouble controlling that class. But plane geometry I recall being totally mystified by for two or three or four weeks. And then suddenly it all made sense, and I loved it."…
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“In a period of awakening, your standard issue Bronx Science student is prime material, and that was true throughout the ’60’s.”By Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories
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"I don’t know if this is okay, but I want to give a shout out to my best friend from high school Joshua Guitellman, who has now passed […] We had very different backgrounds but he was a great guy, always smiling and always happy, and we clicked […] Josh was the first person who passed away in my life that it took me a while to even get back to norm…
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“My creativity ended up in trying to solve problems. Principal Stanley Blumenthal used to have Lunch With the Principal once a month, where you could come to him with different things you wanted to fix. I would always come to as many of those as I could to suggest different things he could fix around the school and to this day I spend most of my ti…
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“My sister was three years older than I am, so she had been in the country only a few minutes. We were going with someone from our housing project on a bus, and my sister asked her in yiddish, ‘What is that building? It looks different.’ And this woman said ‘that’s not for you. That’s a very special school, you can’t get in there because you’re an …
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“It was a crazy time in the early ’60’s. I have a vivid recollection of getting yelled at for not standing straight during the pledge of allegiance, and I vowed never to go to assembly in the morning again, which I could avoid by going to Math Lab. That was really the focus of my life for a few years: not getting drafted, staying in engineering, fi…
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