Melissa Bailey Photo
Pilliner helps Adam Davies create a puzzle cube.
One day after being named Teacher of the Year, Garfield Pilliner took a pop quiz — and revealed a few secrets on his unusual career trajectory and how he earned the nickname “Cool Bean.”
Pilliner (pictured), who’s 36, took the quiz Wednesday in his second-floor classroom at the Engineering & Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), where he had just finished teaching a lesson on designing puzzle cubes. He taught the class on the day after he showed up at the school board to receive a new title, Teacher of the Year.
Name: Garfield Pilliner
Job: Teaching Intro to Engineering and Design to kids in grades 9 to 11 at ESUMS
Grew up: In Jamaica, then West Haven.
Lives in: Hamden with his wife, Anna Blanding Pilliner, and their 2‑year-old son, Daniel.
His answers to the quiz are summarized below, with direct quotations in quotation marks.
How long have you been teaching?
Ten years.
What do kids call you?
Mr. Pilliner. Mr. Pill-Pill. Cool Bean.
That’s because he’s the picture of equanimity.
“The most important thing about teaching is to have a jovial spirit.” If a teacher has a negative attitude, it blocks students out.
A teacher needs to hold kids to high standards, but also take time to “vibe about music” with them. Not to mention sports.
What did you do before this?
Worked at Sikorsky from 1998 to 2001 as a junior electrical engineer, wiring aircraft to make sure they had enough power.
Why switch to teaching?
In 2003, a friend called from Harding High School, a comprehensive school in Bridgeport, with an invitation: “Come over to Harding High and we’ll try to do something awesome.” Pilliner got hired as a long-term sub, teaching geometry and Algebra 1. After the first year, he wasn’t sure about teaching as a profession. But a fellow teacher told him something powerful: She had assigned kids to write an essay on who had the biggest influence on their lives. “Lots of kids said, Mr. Pilliner.”
Pilliner went on to get his master’s in secondary math from the University of Bridgeport, and returned in the fall of 2005 as a full-time teacher.
Why did you join New Haven schools?
“To be in a place where engineering is the focus.” He tried to get a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program going in Bridgeport, but it never got off the ground. In 2009, he joined ESUMS in its second year, when it had grades 6 and 7. Now it serves grades 6 to 11.
Shyam Patel and Ivan Torres.
What was your most difficult day?
At Harding High, “I had to teach an SAT class.” There was one student who was known as a class clown, a “knucklehead” who was always out in the halls because he had disrupted class. Before the class came in, Pilliner thought strategically about how to seat the kids. “I want him to be close to me.” He directed the first kids to start filling the seats from the back of the room. By the time the student came in, only seats in the front row were left.
“Hell, no, I’m not sitting in the front of the class,” the kid told Pilliner. Pilliner, who has a broad smile, Jamaican lilt, and relaxed demeanor, thought about what to do: “Should I stand my ground, or ask him to quietly sit?” He opted for non-confrontation. The student sat down. He slouched.
“What are we going to do today?” the student demanded. “It wasn’t an inquisitive tone.” It was confrontational.
“I want to set some parameters” about how the class will go, Pilliner replied.
“This is an SAT class. You should know what you’re doing!” the student shot back in reply.
The student continued to ask confrontational questions until Pilliner asked the student to leave. He asked him three times, and the student didn’t budge. Pilliner told him, in a calm voice, that he was being “insubordinate.” The student still refused to go. Then Pilliner did something he never did — he raised his voice.
“I went from 0 to 100.”
“I need for you to leave my class,” Pilliner told the student, clapping his hands three times for emphasis.
The student got the message and left.
Pilliner reflected on the incident afterwards. What could he have done to diffuse the confrontation? As he replayed the scenario, Pilliner gave the student the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Pilliner had erred in “assuming he was a knucklehead” based on the student’s reputation. Maybe he should have assumed the student’s best intentions, let him ask two questions, and moved on. Most of all, Pilliner felt uncomfortable with having raised his voice. No student should have to be talked to that way, he said.
“That was one of the most intense days I’ve had,” Pilliner said. Since then, Pilliner said, he has never raised his voice in that manner again.
Shreya Patel.
How about your most rewarding day?
Pilliner’s face lit up at this question. He had just heard from a kid he had taught in Bridgeport.
The kid was part of a 9th-grade geometry class. There were five boys and 20 girls. Engineering wasn’t on the curriculum, but Pilliner found a way to squeeze it in. On the first day of class, he recalled, he gave an “elaborate talk” on the need for engineers in the workforce. Even though he had left the profession, he was pumped up about sending kids on that path. Kids were puzzled, at first: Wasn’t this supposed to be geometry class? But he kept plugging engineering throughout the year.
That group of kids graduated from high school in 2009. Pilliner emailed them — yes, he still kept all of their emails, eight years after teaching them — this fall to ask how they were doing. He heard back from one boy, now a young man, the next day.
“Mr. Pilliner, I’ve been dying to talk to you! Thanks for introducing me to engineering,” the student wrote, Pilliner recalled. The student, who hails from Bridgeport, announced he had graduated from Northeastern University with a bachelor’s in computer science, earned a master’s in business administration, and is now starting his own engineering company.
“Whoa!” Pilliner responded.
“It really hit me: ‘Oh my gosh, the potential of exposure is powerful.’”
“When educators are innovative,” and care, it can “minimize difficult background factors. The education, the belief, the exposure, trumps all of that.”
What makes you Teacher of the Year?
“I’m living what I believe,” stressing the importance of a STEM education. “I’m a bulldog when it comes to ensuring that our kids have resources,” and a “robust engineering program.” At ESUMS, he said, he has pushed the school to make sure that kids as early as grades 6 are receiving the training they need to meet expectations in higher grades.
He has also taken on various leadership roles: chair of the engineering department; member of the city’s “emerging leaders” program; and a “teacher facilitator” leading groups of his peers in extra training. He is also getting trained to grade and support his peers through the city’s teacher evaluation program. And he’s working on his doctorate of education with a focus on “school leadership and teachers’ self-efficacy.”
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
“If it were a utopian world, I would want to be a master teacher.” He’d still teach two classes, and spend the rest of his time coaching other teachers around the district who want to “shift their instructional practice” from good to excellent.
He said he wouldn’t want to leave the classroom to become an administrator. “I want to stay connected to the kids.” It may sound corny, he said, but “every day I come in with a set of kids here who have this raw passion. All they need is constraints. Let’s just guide that passion.”
Pilliner is in luck: New Haven is creating new roles for just that kind of teacher leadership under the next teachers contract.
Edward Vega and Isaac Faustino.
What advice do you have for new teachers?
Listen to your gut. For example, he said, he was talking to new teachers at a comprehensive high school who came across a hole in kids’ learning — something they were supposed to have learned before. More senior teachers advised them to skip over it and not waste time re-teaching it.
He advised the new teachers to take the senior teachers’ advice with “as we say in Jamaica, a sprinkle of salt.”
“Value everyone’s voice,” he said, but “you know your students. If you need to reteach a concept, trust yourself that that’s right for your class.” If senior teachers tell you otherwise, test out that advice by visiting their classrooms.
“You have to come in with your own compass” — your own philosophy and “core values.” Those values guide you, for example, when your class gets off pace with the district’s curriculum. Sometimes you have to be “bold enough” to slow down and “establish mastery” before moving on.
“Be grounded to who you are.”
Bonus points: Students’ Grades For Their Teacher
Student gave their teacher high marks during a class Wednesday. He gave them a design problem: Take 27 little cubes, form five pieces of three to six cubes each, and fit them together to form a three-by-three-by-three cube. Students got half an hour to assemble the puzzle, then timed each other on how fast they could solve it.
Irsal Tomasati (pictured), 14, of West Haven, an aspiring architect: “I usually like this class. It’s usually the highlight of my day.” In other classes, students are “limited” in what they can do. “Here, I can be creative.”
Adam Davies, 14, of Milford: “The instructions are clear. Very creative thinking is needed. … I’m big on creative thinking.”
Isaac Faustino, 14, of New Haven, an aspiring biomedical engineer: “This class is definitely challenging.” He stayed up from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. drawing puzzle pieces. On Wednesday, he consulted those drawings to come up with a very difficult cube.
Edward Vega, 14, of Fair Haven, said he was “freaking out” at first because his pieces were the wrong size and he couldn’t complete the cube as required. Within half an hour, he had figured it out, and enjoyed it. “This is our first real project. It’s the first challenge in a long time, come to think of it, in school.”
Alex Gonzalez (at right in photo with Juan Mesa), a junior who’s new to the school, gave his own review — not in words, but in actions.
He worked intently to try to solve classmate Shreya Patel’s cube, which had already stumped one other student.
“Oh my Jesus!” Alex called out as Pilliner brought class to an end.
“I want to keep going.”