Mrs. Mastrande Honored at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center!!!

It's been great to work with Mrs. Mastrande in the past.  She's a great teacher and is passionate about her students learning and growing.  Here's an article that NY Newsday wrote up about a program that Mrs. Mastrande and her team worked on, centering around 9/11.

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/teachers-develop-curriculum-about-9-11-1.2714152

Teachers develop curriculum about 9/11
February 25, 2011 by MARIA ALVAREZ.

Michelle Mastrande, a seventh grade teacher from Lynbrook,

When Great Neck middleschool teacher Michelle Mastrande noticed early in the school year that students knew few facts about the terrorist attacks that changed the nation almost 10 years ago, she decided to do something about it.

She developed an eight-week program to teach students about the events that began with the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"They did not know how the two planes went into the towers and that there were plane crashes in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., and that they were terrorist attacks," said Mastrande, 32, a teacher at the Richard S. Sherman Great Neck North Middle School.

Mastrande, a Lynbrook resident who is married to an NYPD officer, was one of four teachers honored Friday at Ground Zero for her work helping educate children on the subject.

Speaking before receiving her award at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center - a learning resource where first-person accounts of 9/11 are preserved through tours and gallery exhibits - Mastrande said that although students grew up hearing about 9/11, attended assemblies with moments of silence on each of the nine anniversaries, no one had explained in detail or put into perspective what happened that day or why it happened.

So she and a team of math, science and social studies teachers spent the past eight weeks teaching children about 9/11. "They went home and started asking their parents questions. They began to understand this historic event," Mastrande said of the 130 seventh graders who took the course.

Several days a week, for 40 minutes, students investigated the medical science behind the diseases afflicting rescue workers, used statistics to analyze the economic impact of 9/11 and read and wrote poems and essays about the event.

The students also visited Ground Zero and toured the Tribute Center. Back at school they listened to the stories of an NYPD rescue worker and an ironworker who helped in the recovery and cleanup efforts.

For 12-year-old Kayla Gonzalez of Great Neck, the experience was enlightening.

"I didn't know that it was an act of hatred," she said of the attacks. "I did not understand about terrorism. Today I have more perspective."

Michelle Zak, 13, of Great Neck said she now has insight into the emotional toll. "I saw the drawings of children whose parents died and the eulogies," she said.

As for Mastrande, she said, "This was the best experience in my teaching career."