Spotlight on Ms. Castillo

Ms. Tatiana Castillo is a seventh grade humanities teacher and a QSI graduate. This year is her fourth year teaching at QSI.   

Q: Did someone or something inspire you to become a teacher?

A: My mom is actually a teacher, she actually retired. She taught Dual Language third grade in Brooklyn for 20 plus years. I would always help her with her lesson plans since I was probably in fourth or fifth grade and I feel like my mom inspired me to be a teacher and I kind of just followed her footsteps. I love kids and I love making a difference and I want kids to pursue their dreams and careers. Everyone is capable of achieving anything and I feel like teachers are superheroes and I want to be a superhero for education. 

Q: How long have you been teaching at QSI? 

A: This will be my fourth year teaching here. 

Q: What do you like about teaching at QSI? 

A: One thing I love about QSI is that it is family oriented and a lot of different cultures are incorporated. So that’s why I love teaching here because I feel like they are very accepting of everyone and it’s a small community and very family oriented. 

Q: Is that one of the reasons why you decided to come back after graduating? 

A: Yes, definitely. And I feel like we also have different enrichment days, like the half days, that are very interactive. So I feel like that’s one of the reasons why I came back, because first of all who doesn’t like half days and I love seeing the kids having fun and like I say its a community based school so that’s another reason why I also came back. I also came back to QSI because I want to influence students to take early college credits. QSI is about early college initiative. I was able to graduate with 42 college credits that I transferred over to Baruch College. I want to inform students of the opportunities they can have when they graduate high school with college credits, they can even graduate college early. 

Q: What was it like being a student at QSI?

A: It was a lot different, so back then we didn’t have Chromebooks, we kind of just worked with paper and pencil, we didn’t have half days, we didn’t have all the opportunities you all have to study abroad so really we tried our best to have fun but it still was very family oriented. 

Q: Are any teachers you had as a student still teaching today? 

A: Yes. Mr. London was my tenth grade math teacher. Ms. Sequeira was my ninth grade English teacher and then she became my college advisor. Mr. Frank was my English teacher in tenth. Ms. Kalontarov was my eleventh grade English teacher. Mr. DiMonte also was my ninth grade history teacher and Ms. Pereria as well, she was my Spanish teacher. And Mr. Belliterra was my gym teacher.  

Q: Is it weird to call your former teachers by their first names? 

A: I still call them by their last name and they tell me “you know you can call me by my first name.” But I’m still getting used to it and I’m still kinda new teaching here. I’m starting to get more comfortable calling them by their first name. But it is a little awkward calling them by their first name when I’m so used to saying Mr. Frank or Mrs. Sequeira. Her name was Ms. Wolf so that is the name I have in my mind so I guess it is a little awkward but I’m getting used to it.