If there’s one place most of us would rather not revisit, it’s junior high. But Anna Nazaruk does that every day. A graduate of Westlake Middle School in Thornwood, NY, Anna now teaches sixth-grade math in the same building where she herself learned fractions. “She was a spirited kid,” recalls Westlake’s principal, Jerry Schulman, who was assistant principal when Anna was a student (and a cheerleader and student council president). “She was enthusiastic and energetic, but also very warm and mature,” he adds.

Colleagues say Anna’s empathetic, tuned-in teaching style springs naturally from her bighearted personality. “She shows the students respect, so they respect her,” says fellow teacher Michele Caterino. Anna, 31, says her students also listen—and look up—to her because of what they have in common. “I know how it feels to be the little kid in a big new school,” she tells them. “I was sitting in your seat!” 

Anna’s students give her the best possible sixth-grade performance evaluation: “Mrs. Naz rocks.” Another popularity index: “They like her so much, they often hang out in her classroom at lunchtime talking about things like who was voted off American Idol or the latest Ed Hardy clothes,” says Michele, praising Anna’s ability to be both commanding and “cool.”

A true hometown girl, Anna has been married for seven years to her teenage crush, Danny. They have two children: Gabriella, 4, and Cole, 19 months, whose birth—three months early—was followed by a rocky stint in the NICU. Now, Anna is elated to report, her son is happy and healthy.

If anything prepared Anna to face a loved one’s medical challenges, it was growing up with her brother, Joey, 29, who has cystic fibrosis, an inherited chronic, and ultimately fatal, genetic disease affecting the lungs and digestive system. “I had to mature quickly and become more independent because my parents needed to focus on Joey,” says Anna. “That helped me see life in a different light. Any problems that came up for me were trivial compared to what my brother was dealing with.” 

Joey has also indirectly helped teach Anna’s students. Every year as a school project, they help her raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Beyond percentages and decimals, she says, “my goal is to teach them that it’s important to help those in need. We talk about how wonderful it would feel to know that our donations helped fund a clinical trial that led to a cure for this disease. Even though they’re only eleven and twelve years old, they understand the importance of giving, and I hope they carry it throughout their lives.” 

Together At Last
Anna’s parents came to the United States from Italy the year before she was born. She started kindergarten here speaking Italian, with only a few words of English. But her outgoing personality helped her thrive—and some of the friends she made that year are still her friends, she says.

By junior year in high school, Anna knew she wanted to be a teacher. It was Shakespeare rather than Pythagoras, though, that inspired her: an eleventh grade English class assignment to teach a portion of Macbeth to her own class, writing a quiz, assigning homework and grading the results. “I felt totally at ease standing in front of my classmates and immediately realized that teaching was the perfect fit for me,” she recalls. “I spoke with my teacher after class, and her words about inspiring children to learn and making a lasting difference in their lives have stayed with me to this day.”

Even earlier than that—at age 11— Anna knew the man she wanted to marry. But that, unlike her career choice, was a teenage pipe dream, like a “celebrity crush,” she says. The object of her affection: her best friend Rosie’s big brother’s best friend, Danny. “He was always so nice to me and so handsome, especially in his football and baseball uniforms,” she sighs. She pined in silence, watching his games from the bleachers with friends, sure nothing would ever happen. Even into her early twenties, she says, “I was always waiting for Rosie to break the news that Danny was engaged.” 

Instead, when Anna was in college, and still carrying a torch, the news came that Danny’s long-term relationship was over. Rosie’s brother intervened, asking Danny whom he would marry if it were up to him. “If I wanted to marry somebody,” said Danny, “it would be Anna.” Even when Danny finally asked her out, Anna was sure her friends were playing tricks. So was he. “She’d never given me the time of day,” he says today. “Later I realized it was because she was embarrassed, but back then I assumed she just didn’t care for me.” Their first date, ten years in the making, stretched into the wee hours—and nine months later, they were engaged.

Danny is still smitten with his bride. He admires her love for and devotion to her family—and everyone else’s family, too. “When anyone has a baby, she’s over there helping with breastfeeding problems or dealing with colic, or on the phone talking them through whatever they need,” he says. “She’s the kind of person other people want to be.”
 
Juggling, Struggling
Anna’s pregnancy with Gabriella was free of complications. So was her pregnancy with Cole—until week 26, when preterm contractions began while she was teaching a class. Doctors couldn’t stop the labor, and—though she’d told her colleagues she’d be back for seventh period—tiny Cole came into the world, weighing 2.5 pounds. He went straight to the NICU. “Leaving the hospital in a wheelchair with no baby in my arms was so difficult and wrong,” she says. Complication after harrowing complication ensued. (As the neonatologist told her, “Cole read the book on premature babies and did not skip a chapter.”) But when homecoming day finally arrived two and a half months later, Anna asked the nurse to take her to her car in a wheelchair while she held Cole in her arms. “It was my way of making what was once so wrong right,” she says.
Anna was able to take an extended nine-month leave after Cole’s birth. But now she juggles, and struggles, like other working moms. “One day last fall I was in Supermom mode, baking brownies for my students while doing laundry and playing Chutes and Ladders and giving Cole a bottle,” she says. “I ended up with burnt brownies, wrinkled clothes and two kids who wanted more attention from their mommy. It didn’t take me long to reprioritize. When I’m home from school, Gabby and Cole come first. Chores and emails just have to wait.”

Anna’s friends deeply admire her resolve and resilience—and see the softie underneath the sturdy exterior. “Anna is the strongest person I know,” says her close friend Lori Pfeiffer. “But then you look over and see that she’s crying over a commercial.”

 
Math Comes Alive
Her empathy for others also makes her a great math teacher. One obstacle she faces, she says, is that kids often come to her class certain they’re bad at math. “My job is to change their minds,” she says. Her signature style is to use “tricks” that make math make sense—and more fun. Her most famous is “the Backwards NaZ”—using a reverse Z pattern to find a common denominator. “Math was hard for me, but the way she taught it, it stuck in my brain,” says former student Nicole Papa, 16. “I actually like math a lot now.”

Anna also strives to make math relevant to real life. She ties fractions to cooking, relates percentages to calculating sale prices and uses the total amount of the stimulus package as an exercise in scientific notation. “Those connections make it more interesting and more concrete,” she says. More entertaining, too.  She uses the names of American Idol contestants to demonstrate Venn diagrams, and—on a really good day— the popular Cha Cha Slide line dance to warm up the kids for a lesson on “sliding” shapes across quadrants.

But there’s real life, and there’s real life. “My biggest challenge as an educator is to help students learn math while there are so many emotional and social distractions in their lives,” she says. “Today’s students have to face so many hardships: divorce, financial problems, peer pressure. I care about them as a whole person, not just a student.” While she demands high achievement, she’s also quick to offer kids the benefit of the doubt when she’s aware that there’s stuff going on at home.

Her philosophy: “Sixth grade is important, but it’s not going to be the cornerstone of their education. Their well-being as an eleven- or twelve-year-old is much more important than one night’s homework.” Overall, she says, “being a mom and a teacher go hand in hand. I try to treat my students the way I would want my kids’ teachers to treat them.”

She does her best to bring the parents into the equation as well. But with 130 students altogether, she’s usually able to contact parents only when problems arise. “I want to share positive things, too,” she says, so she invites parents to call or email her just to check in—and to ask her what they can be doing at home to support their kids’ learning. One suggestion she always makes is to reinforce math lessons outside the classroom, for example, by comparing unit prices at the supermarket. 

Anna especially hopes parents consciously foster an enjoyment of math in their daughters, since girls get so many messages telling them math and science are for boys, and expose them to a full range of activities, “girly” and otherwise. “It’s fine if a girl wants to play dress-up— I know my daughter does—but I also make sure she does things like swimming and playing soccer,” she says. 

Anna goes out of her way to call on girls even when they don’t have their hand up, and to remind them that they can be anything they want to be—math teacher, architect, rocket scientist— even if they just made a multiplication mistake. It’s not only her students who count on her for that rock-solid support. Says Lori: “When I come to Anna with a problem, and there are times I talk to her five times a day, the first thing she says is ‘You can do this.’”