ON A BRIGHT ALUMNI WEEKEND IN APRIL, the sounds of a celebration filled the air above TCNJ’s Green Lawn. There were shouts of recognition and bursts of laughter as hundreds of alumni zigzagged from one cluster of friends to another, eager to catch up.

But beneath the din, one woman’s words stood out as she waved away an acquaintance who asked what she did for a living.

I’m just a teacher.

Just a teacher? Just a minute.

Each day in classrooms across the country, teachers are doing the complicated and indispensable work that carries a generation into the wider world. They are there for kindergartners and middle-schoolers and seniors alike, helping them learn to think, fail, and try again. To become who they want to be. Teachers are not just anything. In fact, they’re perhaps no less than everything for countless kids every day.

Since its founding as the New Jersey State Normal School in 1855 — the ninth teacher training college in the United States — TCNJ has launched thousands of teachers into schools across the state and beyond. It’s time we take a moment to celebrate the extraordinary work being done by some of them today.

CHRISTINE GIRTAIN ’94

Toms River High Schools North and South, Toms River

What’s possible for Toms River students enrolled in Christine Girtain’s scientific research course?

A better question is: What isn’t?

Over the past two decades, Girtain’s students have evaluated breast cancer incidence in younger patients, studied the formation of the Earth’s moon, and extracted unique DNA sequences from mosquitoes. One boy even built a solar-powered boat from scratch.

These extraordinary projects wouldn’t exist without Girtain’s herculean efforts; she guides students at both high schools up the ladder of successful inquiry while also working tirelessly to ensure they have the resources and inspiration they need.

Since helping to launch the scientific research elective in 2005, she has raised more than $185,000 in grants for research equipment and cheerfully stalked LinkedIn for scientists who might be willing to share their expertise with her students as guest speakers. She’s taken students to Costa Rica and arranged cross-ocean collaborations with a class in Israel. Not long ago, she invited a plant pathologist from Missouri to Zoom in, because why not?

“The kids mocked me for that one,” she says. “And then they listened to the guy, and were like, ‘Slam dunk!’”

Girtain grew up in Toms River, climbing trees, scanning the skies for meteor showers, and exploring New York’s Museum of Natural History with her father. Neither of her parents went to college, but they taught her to prize learning above all else.

“You have to continuously educate yourself to better educate your students,” she says. 

Girtain, affectionately nicknamed “Mama G,” earned the 2022–23 New Jersey State Teacher of the Year Award for her dedication to students.

“I was meant to do this,” she says. “I get a rush, honestly, from seeing how excited they are with the new experiences, and then seeing what they go do after that.”

Her students have become doctors, engineers, and psychologists. That boy who built the solar-powered boat? He went on to study marine engineering at the prestigious Webb Institute in Glen Cove, New York, and later became a naval architect. When the first ship he designed went to sea, he signed the blueprints and gave them to Girtain.

DANIEL LEE ’12

Princeton Middle School, Princeton

In Daniel Lee’s classroom, math lessons unfold with an unexpected twist and a kind of fun not always found in the thickets of algebra.

He serves homemade brownies, iced with a lowercase cursive letter (for example, r for Rachel, j for Josh) to launch a personalized discussion about variables. He leads a real-time baking challenge to reveal his famous chocolate chip recipe while unraveling the mysteries of ratios. And, to his squirming students’ delight, he conjures silly stories about numbers falling in love to decode least common multiples.

Four and Six are soulmates, they just don’t know it yet. When are they going to meet for the first time at the coffee shop?

For Lee, there is no time to waste on dry lectures at the chalkboard.

“I’m my students’ teacher for 10% of their life, which is quite a large percentage, because they’re only 11,” Lee says. “I take that time really seriously. And I feel like my purpose is to draw out the best in them.”

Math is a factor in that equation. But not the only one.

JEANETTE CAPRITTI ’19

 Lawrence Middle School, Lawrenceville

When Jeanette Capritti took her seventh graders back to class after an assembly-turned-surprisecelebration, one student confessed his expectations for the morning had been low.

“I thought it would be another boring assembly,” he said. 

Boring it was not. 

Instead, Capritti received the 2025 Milken Family Foundation Educator Award, given to just a few dozen exemplary educators across the country each year.

The $25,000 award was a thrill. “My jaw was hanging down in disbelief,” she says. But for Capritti, the work unfolding in her classroom every day is the real reward.

“Teaching, to me, is the greatest job in the world,” she says. “Teachers are the ones who make all other jobs possible. Without teachers, nobody could go to school to become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer. But more than that, teachers make people see themselves.”

Capritti’s hand is forever raised to help facilitate student success, her fingerprints on everything from the school’s summer literacy program and professional development efforts to a genre writing elective she helped create.

Determined to empower students through the study of language arts, she works tirelessly to give them “core memories,” those moments of self-discovery and academic triumph that will stick with them throughout their lives. 

For her signature science-fiction unit, Capritti dresses as an alien with glow sticks in her hair, arms students with intergalactic passports, and sets them loose among stations filled with books and puzzles. She breathes life into lessons about inference with a hands-on whodunit that sends them sorting through backpacks brimming with clues to sleuth out a suspect.

“I always think, ‘How can I make these lessons memorable and engaging?’” she says.

KASSANDRA SÁNCHEZ ’20

Stony Brook Elementary School, Pennington

Third graders at Stony Brook Elementary know that Miss Sánchez hates roller coasters and loves summer, that her favorite movie is Matilda, and that she plans a big party in the city next door.

That party — Trenton’s Puerto Rican Day Festival — and Sánchez’s proud role in it have helped shape the classroom that surrounds them, from the cozy reading corner brimming with books that spotlight cultures from around the world to the lessons threaded throughout their days, including a recent Diwali celebration.

“I show them how I celebrate my culture, and I also celebrate their culture with them,” she says. “Hopefully, it’s building that sense of identity, teaching them to love who they are.”

Sánchez talks about her family and the local history of Trenton’s Puerto Rican community, which she documented for a research project while at TCNJ, so students can feel free to share their own stories. And they do, describing traditions behind their names, the foods they eat, and the special outfits they wear on holidays.

Her determination to help them discover who they are stems from her own certainty about who she is: a proud Puerto Rican woman and, especially, a teacher. 

It was a career choice that had its skeptics. 

As valedictorian of her high school graduating class, Sánchez was constantly asked one question: Will you study medicine or law?

When her answer, “I’m going to be a teacher,” shocked everyone, she briefly hedged her bets and enrolled in TCNJ as a chemistry major. The experiment lasted for half a semester. Sánchez switched to elementary education and never looked back.

“Right away, it was like being home,” she says.

 

JAVIER NICASIO ’16

Passaic County Technical Institute, Passaic

“Smiley Boy.” That’s what the principal at Paterson’s P.S. 29 once dubbed Javier Nicasio, the kid forever beaming in the hallways. Here was a kid who absolutely loved school. The read-alongs and math challenges. The field trips and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new library. The history lessons about Ireland that came with a crash course in Irish step dance. Though the nickname didn’t stick past elementary school, the joy sparked by the setting certainly did. 

Nicasio always dreamed of a classroom of his own, but when his eighth-grade English teacher organized a cleanup of the creek that ran behind the school, a sense of greater purpose emerged; pulling rusted bikes from the murky water alongside friends and neighbors, he realized a teacher’s impact extends far beyond the classroom. 

“She made me want to teach in my own community, as a way of giving back,” he says. 

Now an education and training instructor at his high school alma mater, Nicasio is on a mission to shape the next generation of teachers and inspire them to bring their talents back to the Passaic schools. His teaching style — spiked with TikTok quotes and plenty of jokes — is as exuberant as you might expect of a past member of TCNJ’s Homecoming Court. But he wants his enthusiasm to be infectious, whether cheering on seniors planning preschool lessons or coaching his budding educators to a second-place finish at the SkillsUSA Championship, a hands-on workforce development competition. And it just might be working. Recently, a student printed up a nameplate of his own and placed it on Nicasio’s desk.

“He wants my job,” Nicasio says. “That makes me very happy.”

MARISOL GUTIERREZ ’02

Ben Franklin Elementary School, Lawrence Township

Marisol Gutierrez walked into her first kindergarten classroom 23 years ago wearing a pantsuit, two-inch heels, and a giddy smile. She was ready.

By day’s end, her pants were covered in chalk dust, and her feet ached — but the smile was intact. She ditched the heels and kept the joy, channeling it into a classroom philosophy that revolved around connecting with students

Over the years, as she moved to third and then second grade, Gutierrez prided herself on knowing her kids. But one day, she met a student she couldn’t crack. So she tried something new, surprising the girl at her softball game. That Monday, the girl shared the news in class: “Mrs. Gutierrez was at my game!”

“I saw her excitement,” Gutierrez says. “And everything changed.”

Word spread, and a flood of invitations followed. To basketball games and birthday parties and dance performances. Gutierrez didn’t hesitate.

“I said ‘Yes’ to everything,” she says. Over the years, she’s been to karate tournaments, piano recitals, and soccer matches. She’s watched a student dance in The Nutcracker, cheered through football games, and attended exactly one wrestling match. (“It was so stressful!” she says.)

“I want them to know I’m not only their cheerleader in the classroom. I care about them outside of the classroom, too,” she says.

It’s a lesson she’s shared with dozens of TCNJ student teachers, not only by telling them how important it is but also by showing them how it is done, as she visited Packer Hall to watch their basketball games, too.

“Connecting with students is really important,” Guiterrez says. “It’s the first thing I teach my student teachers, and I emphasize it all the time. Students are not going to learn from somebody who doesn’t respect their uniqueness, their individuality.” 

 

Photos: Peter Murphy