Do you have to be Jewish to love Levy’s?

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Walking into my first class of the day, I was startled to see a petite lady ‘of a certain age’ standing on a lab table, towering over the class. A raspy, yet booming voice commanded our attention. Welcome to AP Biology! This will be a tough class, so if you can’t handle the work, leave now. No one moved.

This introduction to Ms. Roz Bierig, Ms. B for short, foreshadowed her unconventional teaching method. Since her admonishing speech on the first day of school, the class did get more difficult; tests became as frequent as twice a week and notes piled up quickly. But she made the dense material easy to digest by teaching with unfettered passion for the subject. Once, while avidly drawing monocot structures, she must have said plants are the coolest things twenty times. Many of us in the room were clueless as to why a commonplace organism could arouse such passion, but to Ms. B. everything about biology was cool. This attitude kept her teaching until 75.

What Ms. B taught went beyond the scope of the biology curriculum. Throughout the year, she shared with us the most important moments of her life: her husband’s tragic death, her grandchildren’s latest shenanigans, and her passion for Judaism. Although she took time out of class to delve into what some saw as tangents, I appreciated her stories; they gave me a different perspective of one who had experienced a full life. One day, during class, she received a call from a hospital. Her sister had passed away. In the remainder of the period, Ms. B eulogized her sister. We could always make up the work another day; listening to our bereaved teacher trace the life of her beloved sister was more important.

By springtime AP Biology easily became my favorite subject and Ms. B was even more animated as the term was ending. In June, she was organizing the Stuyvesant contingent for the Israel Day Parade and was worried that our school would be poorly represented. I asked her if you had to be Jewish to march. A wide smile crossed her face and she said, “Danny-boy, you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” I failed to grasp her reference to a long ago ad campaign for rye bread, but it didn’t matter. I volunteered and recruited other students. We proudly carried the banner that read Stuyvesant HS as we marched up Fifth Avenue. I had never been in a parade before and was exhilarated by it. I also felt incredibly humbled by the fact that I was so warmly received.

I now understood why Ms. Bierig brought so many cross references to her teaching, many of which had nothing to do with biology. There is so much more to education than what one gets in classrooms or labs. Education is about meeting others, some of whom may be vastly different from you, and exchanging ideas.