ABSTRACT
I began my teaching career at an intermediate school in Brooklyn, New York in 1966. Two years later, I moved to P.S. 25 in the Bronx, the first public bilingual school in the Northeast. An innovative school, P.S. 25 was based on two important ideas: that bilingualism was an asset upon which teachers and students could build, and that parent involvement was a crucial factor in student success. I was not fully convinced of either of these ideas when I began teaching at that school (after all, I had never had the benefits of a bilingual education myself, and my parents had never been “involved” in the traditional sense of that word), but I became a firm believer of both within a couple of months.
