Laurence and Semaji: We’re Not Done Yet

Rachael: Welcome to this week's episode of Formative. Our guest today is Dr. Laurence Aronstein, a lifelong educator who has dedicated nearly 50 years to public education as a teacher first, and now a superintendent. Through his coaching firm, Educational Performance Consultants, he's guided more than 800 school leaders and aspiring leaders to grow and thrive. In today's conversation, we dive into the most pressing challenges facing our public school system, the biggest mistakes he's made over the course of his career, and what drew him back to the field after retirement. 

Rachael: Hello and welcome. I'm Rachael Gazdick, CEO of New York Edge, and my co-host today is Semaji from M.S. 452K. Semaji, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Semaji: My name is Semaji. My hobbies are football. My subjects that I'm strong in and my favorite subjects are math and science. What I like the most is learning about other people. 

Rachael: And who are we interviewing today? 

Semaji: Today I'm talking to Dr. Larry Aronstein, and I'm excited to talk to him to understand where he comes from.

Rachael: Dr. Larry, thanks so much for joining us. Semaji, what's your first question? 

Semaji: My first question is, can you tell me what your job is so I could get a better understanding of how you work? 

Dr. Aronstein: I'm a superintendent of schools and I work, uh, here in Wyandanch, which is on Long Island. But way before that…

Semaji: Interesting. 

Dr. Aronstein: Yep. Way before that, 60 years ago, I started off as a teacher in New York City, in Queens. At a point, I retired. I retired, uh, about 15 years ago. When I went back and became a superintendent, my oldest grandchild, who at the time was about six or seven years old, said, “Hey, grandpa, you know, you went back to work. What do you do?” And I started to try to explain to him how I help teachers and I help principals and all of that. And he's listening and he said, “So what you're saying is that you are the boss of everybody?” I said, “Yeah, that's what I do. I'm the boss of everybody.” He said, “So you are the boss of my principal?” And I said, “Well, if I worked in, in your, you know, your school district, yes, I would be the boss of your principal.” 

So I do a lot of stuff all day long. I get to work at about, uh, eight o'clock in the morning, and very often I have evening meetings. There were times that I don't walk back in my house until 11 o'clock at night.

Semaji: Oh, wow. 

Dr. Aronstein: I'm very, very busy. I have to take care of, uh, making sure all of the buildings have heat, uh, and, and are clean. I have to make sure that we have plenty of money to operate with. I have to make sure that all the teachers have whatever they need. I have to make sure that everybody's doing their jobs. And if they're not doing their jobs, I have to make sure we hire enough people. All of that. Here, I'm the boss of about a thousand people. 

Semaji: Oh, wow. 

Dr. Aronstein: Yeah. So I have a lot of responsibility. 

Semaji: Yeah. And with those responsibilities, like sometimes is it hard? Like sometimes it's…

Dr. Aronstein: Yeah, it's, it's, it's very, very hard sometimes. Usually it's joyful, usually I have a lot of fun. I have a wonderful staff and I spend a lot of time with them, uh, and they help me with a lot of the things I have to do. Uh, but I would say, well just, uh, on Friday, I had to fire somebody and… 

Semaji: Ohhhh…

Dr. Aronstein: Oh, yeah, uh, because I had to tell her that next year we're not gonna have enough money for her to do her job. And I really liked her and I had to call her in, and I had to tell her that she's not gonna have a job anymore after June 30th. Those are the really hardest things that I have to do, okay? And sometimes when students misbehave, uh, I have to, you know, suspend them and, uh, even tell them that they can't come back to the public schools anymore, and that kind of breaks my heart but these are things that have to be done because they're doing things that are dangerous and could hurt other people. So those are the hard parts of my job, is the dealing with the people, okay? 

Semaji: Mhmm. Interesting, interesting. What are some of the biggest challenges that schools face, that you think you could help solve those problems? 

Dr. Aronstein: Well, there are a lot, we got a lot of challenges. You know, for 60 years I've been involved with this. And I think that the way teachers teach has to be improved. Teachers do too much telling and too much talking, and they have to do a lot more questioning and let the kids answer so that we stimulate them as thinkers. So that's number one, okay?

Number two, I think a lot of what we teach may not be as relevant to students. You know, every time I ever taught a class my whole life, there would be a kid who raises his hand and they would say, “Dr. Aronstein, why do we have to learn this?” Okay. And I always felt as if I needed to give them a good reason, something that they were interested in, something that would be really important in terms of their future, that we ought to be teaching things that are relevant to young people in terms of where they are now and where they're gonna be in the future. And I think we've got tremendous challenges in preparing our young people today to work in a whole different world, uh, in terms of, for instance, technology. You hear all about artificial intelligence. Where are those workers gonna come from? We have to prepare our young people to do that. 

And also a big challenge in terms of young people is that they don't seem to be turned on to the love of learning, that learning is so much fun, to, to learn about the world around you. Uh, and we're very distracted. Okay? My grandchildren, they come home and all they wanna do is to get on their tablets and play games, okay, and they're not spending enough time reading and doing their homework and studying. They spend hours and hours and hours on computers, on, you know, playing games. And that's a real problem that, that faces us every day. 

Semaji: I can understand that 'cause coming from me, I know since I also, when I get home, but like I have a day, like on the weekends I can only play on my games. So like on Fridays I can only play on my, Friday, Saturday, Sunday I can only play on my games.

Dr. Aronstein: Yeah, hours and hours and hours and hours, right. 

Semaji: Uh-huh. Oh, looking back at your career journey, is there anything you would've done differently or do differently? 

Dr. Aronstein: I could probably talk for hours about that and tell you stories that you wouldn't believe, okay. But I'll answer it in a more general way rather than give you a specific story.

You know, I was very successful very early on. Uh, I had my doctorate, I was 29 years old, I was a college professor when I was 25 years old, okay? So I had a lot of very early success in terms of my life. And what happens is sometimes you get a little arrogant, which means you get a little full of yourself and you think you're always right, okay? And you say things like, you know everything, you sound like a know-it-all. And I was that guy, and I found out as a result of going through and making some mistakes that, you know what? Sometimes I'm not the smartest guy in the room, and you have to listen to other people and don't be a know-it-all. And that was a very important lesson for me to learn, that I'm far from perfect, I make mistakes all the time, I am human and I have to listen to the advice and collaborate with other people. So on the job, if there's a problem to be solved, I put my staff around the table with me, I lay out what the problem is and they all have ideas, and a lot of times their ideas are better than my ideas. So that's what I've learned, not to be arrogant, not to be the know it all, but listen to what other people have to say. Open up your ears, that's really important.

Semaji: You decided to retire and you came back to work. I'd like to understand why. 

Dr. Aronstein: Well, you know, when I retired, and this is 15 years ago, I got to do a lot of things I wanted to do. I had more time, and so my wife and I, we did a lot of traveling. We went all over the world. I went to China, I went to Peru, I went to Croatia, I went to Africa, and you know…

Semsaji: Oh wow.

Dr. Aronstein: Yeah, it was really, it was a lot of fun. But after a while, and, and…Oh by the way, I wrote, uh, four books. I always wanted to do some more writing. After doing all of that, I got bored and I said, you know what really makes me happy is going to work every day. So that's when I started going back to work, was I got a little bit bored of having all that fun, if you could believe that. And also, by the way, I had a lot more time to watch the Yankees and go to Yankee games because I'm a big baseball fan. I could tell you all about that if you're interested. 

Semaji: Oh, I'll gladly be interested if you tell me. 

Dr. Aronstein: Okay, so I'm gonna tell you. So I grew up in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. Okay. So how old are you?

Semaji: 12. 

Dr. Aronstein: 12. So when I was like 10 years old up until I was about 14 years old, I collected autographs of the baseball players. So every day, almost every day, I would go to Yankee Stadium either before a night game or after a day game, and I would get their autographs. And in those days, the Yankees weren't the only baseball team in New York, there was the Brooklyn Dodgers. Okay? Now they're Los Angeles, but there was a Brooklyn Dodgers, and there was a New York Giants. So I had the autographs of every player, coach and manager in the major leagues. 

Semaji: Oh my…

Dr. Aronstein: And original. So I would go up to them and get their signatures, and I had a lot of other tricks that I would use in order to get their signatures, okay. We would go on the subway, I would go with my friends. We were like 10 years old, and I would call the newspaper, like the Daily News, okay? And I would say, and try to make my, my voice sound like an adult. So I would say, “Could I speak to the sports desk please?” So somebody, we get on the phone, and I would say, “I understand that the Philadelphia Phillies are in town. Uh, do you know what hotel they're staying in?” He would say, “Yeah, they're staying in the New Yorker hotel” or, “They're staying in the Commodore Hotel.” But these are real hotels that years ago, uh, were in the city. And so my friends and I would go down to the hotel, take the subway. No adults, just us. And we would go to the hotel and stand outside the hotel. And when the players would come out for breakfast or to go to church on Sunday, we would get their signatures, their autographs. So I had all kinds of stories about meeting all of, you know, people today, they're in the Hall of Fame and a lot of them are, you know, have passed, they've died, and I had all of their autographs back in the day.

So I learned a lot of skills as a result of when I was a kid and an autograph collector. You're bringing up, you know, some really wonderful memories for me. 

Semaji: Did you want to be a baseball player when you grew up? 

Dr. Aronstein: No, I really wasn't such a good athlete, so I, I knew I wasn't gonna be a baseball player back in those days. If you had asked me what I wanted to be, I would've said that I wanted to be a lawyer because as you could probably tell, I'm a really good talker. Okay. And even as a kid, I was a good talker. My, my mother would say, you know, you would be a wonderful lawyer, and so I thought about that. And then later on when I got to high school, and I was a pretty good student in high school, especially in science and math. 

Semaji: Same here.

Dr. Aronstein: Yeah, there you go. So then I decided, you know, I'm gonna be a doctor. Well, that didn't quite work out for me because I came from a very poor family and we didn't have enough money for me to go to medical school. And my father said, I'm sorry, but I don't have the money to help you. So I said, that's fine. I said, I'll be, I'll become a teacher. So I became a teacher in New York City and I was a science teacher. I, I started off as an eighth grade science teacher, and then I taught seventh grade and sixth grade, and then I became a college professor. I taught science, uh, at in colleges full-time, I was a professor, 

Semaji: So my favorite subject is, um, math and science. 

Dr. Aronstein: There you go, there you go. 

Semaji: And in math, right now we're doing eighth grade work. 

Dr. Aronstein: I still love math and science, and sometimes I go into classrooms and I teach lessons. I still love to teach kids. I'll go over to the middle school and I'll teach a lesson and, uh, really enjoy doing that and challenging the kids. You know, to me it's all about thinking, what I call inquiry, which is asking a lot of questions and getting kids to think for themselves. 

Semaji: Well, since you know I'm in middle school, can you give me ideas so I know what job or a career I would be good for, or like I could do. 

Dr. Aronstein: You know, the whole world is out there in front of you, all right? And when you go to a real, you know, a nice restaurant, right? And you take a look at the menu, you've got so many choices and there are restaurants that put out a big smorgasbord, that's all kinds of different foods at a table, okay? Many, many, many, many different foods. And so, you know, my hope is that you try and you taste and you see what's really tasty. You see what you love. So education is kinda like that. It's like a smorgasbord, and you should give yourself a chance to taste a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And then if you like it, you get more and more into it. So you, let's say you go to a, you know, a Chinese restaurant and you find out, gee, I really like Chinese food. So you go to other Chinese restaurants and you see different ways in which they prepare. You understand what I'm saying? 

But the key is, uh, I grew up in a family in the Bronx, it was what you would call a tenement. So it was an apartment house. We didn't have an elevator. We walked up to the third floor. My father was a custodian, he washed floors, he cleaned toilets. My mother was handicapped, she couldn't work. And we didn't have a lot of money, we didn't have a car. I didn't go anywhere. I went to New Jersey a couple of times, once I went to Connecticut growing up. I was never on an airplane. So my father would pull me aside and he would say, look, you are a really smart kid, alright? If you are gonna make something of yourself, you gotta get a good education. I want you to go to work every day with a white shirt and a tie, okay? I want you to be a professional person. So I did my homework. I studied and my whole education, my bachelor's degree, my master's degree, my doctorate, Dr. Larry, all on scholarship. My education was for free because I was a good student and I took it seriously. My best advice to you is be a good student. Test the different subject areas like a smorgasbord. Give yourself time to, uh, make you know, to make up your mind, what you wanna do with your life, what interests you, and whatever you pick, you want to pick it because you love doing it, because it fulfills you. And get a good education. Your key to success is getting a good education. How's that? 

Rachael: That's right. I love that. So our final question for you is this, if you could go back and speak to yourself at 12 years old, what would you say? 

Dr. Aronstein: I would tell myself when I was 12 years old that you have no idea where life is gonna take you. I had no idea that, uh, at a point, you know, at various points in my life, uh, that I would be in China. I remember getting off the plane and I said to myself, I'm in China. I'm halfway around the world, okay? I never thought I would be in Africa on a safari. Larry Aronstein from the Bronx, okay? I never thought where I would wind up and the experiences that I've had. I didn't have enough imagination when I was 12 years old to even imagine what life had in store for me. And now I'm 82 years old and, and I'm healthy and I'm vigorous and I got my, you know, wits about me. And I never imagined, I’d still be working at this age and being as productive as I am. So that's my 12-year-old, he didn't know anything about those things.

Rachael: Thanks so much. It's been such a pleasure getting to hear your story. 

Dr. Aronstein: My pleasure. Be well.

CREDITS

Thanks for listening to Formative, a production of New York Edge. I’m your host, Rachael Gazdick. Our production partner for this series is CitizenRacecar. This episode was produced by Hajar Eldaas, post-production by Alex Brouwer, original music by Garrett Tiedemann. Thanks to the whole team at New York Edge for making this series possible. Never miss an episode by subscribing to the series at newyorkedge.org/formative or wherever you get your podcasts.