Opening the issue
Where Vision Meets Voice
The September Issue
Vol. II · No. 02
2026
Science
Teacher
The teacher who spent forty-four years making room for wonder.
The September Issue
theprimecrest.com
PrimeCrest · The September Issue
Vol. II · No. 02 · 2026Editorial
Joan Gillman has kept a science classroom for forty-four years, from blackboard and chalk to a SmartBoard and a Green Team that writes the week's action itself. This edition is about the room she keeps building.
From the Editors
Long before anyone gave her a laboratory, Joan Gillman was mixing powders in the bathroom, sure that a new product would come of it if she only kept going. Forty-four years of teaching later, the habit has a name she uses without embarrassment: making room for wonder.
The facts are plain and we kept them that way. She has taught since 1982. Her first classroom held a blackboard and chalk, and when the first computer arrived she could not find the switch to turn it on. Today, at The Browning School in New York, she teaches across three platforms at once. The tools kept changing. The subject never did.
Her case is a patient one: a child who builds a thing and then teaches it has learned it for good. A stewardship habit small enough to finish can still change a school.
We printed her answers in the order she gave them. After Hurricane Melissa the Green Team collected in the first-floor lobby for four days and ran a bake sale on the fifth. The week raised $2,300.32 for Project Hope and American Friends of Jamaica. None of it stayed at the school. No second career was invented for the photograph.
If your own classroom, or your own team, is running short of wonder this term, the most useful pages here are the quiet ones: the Green Action of the Week, decided by the team and posted on every floor, and a park cleanup that starts at half past seven on a Monday morning.
The Editors
PrimeCrest Editorial DeskRead it slowly. Then go and look at the classroom.
PrimeCrest · The September IssueThe Editor's Letter02
ContentsThe September Issue · Vol. II · 2026
Forty-four Septembers in the same subject.
The desk that put this edition on the page.
The teacher who made room for wonder, from chalk to a SmartBoard.
Bathroom chemistry, shoe-box robots, three platforms, and the record.
Green Action of the Week, posted on every floor.
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Because your story deserves the record.
Credits
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Printed as answered. The Hurricane Melissa total went out in full.
The Signature Story
The teacher who spent forty-four years making room for wonder.
The Signature Story · One
Forty-four years in the room. The tools kept changing. The subject never did.
Her first classroom, in 1982 at St. Angela Merici School, held a blackboard and a box of chalk, and it was everything she needed. When the first computer arrived she could not find the switch. The same hands now run a SmartBoard without a second thought.
The scientist arrived first. As a child she mixed powders in the bathroom, held a yardstick to falling snow, and built robots from shoe boxes. With her older brother she laid out a model town, Kinderkamack Village. Nobody called any of that a curriculum. It was one anyway.
Before the first classroom
In high school there was a community service requirement for graduation. She taught recorder, tutored in math, and organized games in the lower school's playground, making sure every student took part: those who were athletically endowed and those who were not. She also taught swimming at the local JCC, including children with special needs.
Give each child an opportunity to shine, and never give up on the goals you hold for them.
The proof came during her student teaching at P.S. 47, the junior high school for the deaf, where seventh, eighth and ninth graders built a working amusement park, rides and all. She has been biased toward making things ever since.
Three platforms at once
This year at Browning she teaches kindergarten, second, and fourth, and still runs the K-8 Green Team. The youngest students work on Seesaw. In earlier years she also used Google Classroom and Canvas, one platform to a division. She reaches for labs more than she once did, because a student holds a topic longer after building it, writing a song about it, or teaching it to somebody who does not understand it yet.
Artificial intelligence is in the room now. This past year the school pulled the technology back in the science labs, and paper and pencil returned to the bench. The tool is welcome where it helps and set aside where it would do a child's growing for them.
The circuit and the record
She is a Subject Area Representative for STANYS for Elementary Science in NYC. She has led workshops at the STANYS conferences as well as NSTA, STEMTeachersNYC, SCONYC, and NYSAIS. Straw Rockets are Out of This World was published in the NSTA journal Science and Children, then selected for the NSTA book Bringing STEM to the Elementary Classroom.
The honors caught up in 2025 and 2026: Top Educator of the Decade 2026, Woman of the Year and Lifetime Achievement from the IAOTP. She would rather talk about the room. Listen first. Keep a sense of humor on the hard days. Ask for help, because the building is full of teachers, none of them finished learning either.
Students hold a topic longer when they build it, sing it, run it, or teach it.
PrimeCrest · The September IssueThe Classroom06
IAOTP · Top Educator of the Decade 2026, presented to Joan Ava Gillman
The Signature Story · Two
The Green Team decides the Green Action of the Week and posts the signs on each floor. Lights off when you leave the room. Use both sides of the paper. Recycling sorted correctly. No pencils snapped in half for the fun of it. A rule a child wrote is a rule a child keeps.
After Hurricane Melissa they manned a table in the first floor lobby Monday through Thursday and ran a bake sale on Friday. The week raised $2,300.32 for Project Hope and American Friends of Jamaica. The school kept none of it. Earlier they had raised more than a thousand dollars for water.org. They still turn up for Central Park cleanups at half past seven on a Monday morning.
Green Team leaders also take the week's action into homerooms and advisories, and sometimes into assembly. She teaches climate without frightening the children, because fear does not build a steward and a repeated, finishable task does. “The future of our planet will depend on them.”
PrimeCrest · The September IssueThe Green Team07
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The September Issue · 2026