The students in the Curvy Lab at the HS of Fashion Industries in Manhattan have designing dreams — but their dreams feature everyday women, like many of them.

Tanya Sumner, a teacher of English language learners at PS 204 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was just 36 years old in 2017 when she unexpectedly passed out behind the wheel of her car. Sumner, the mother of a 5-year-old girl and a 7-month-old boy, woke up in the hospital to a devastating diagnosis: Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, which had already spread to her spine and hips.

Wearing jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers — with her hair in a ponytail — math teacher Danielle Tutelian doesn’t look much older than her students at the Bronx HS of Business. That works to her advantage.

Fourth-graders from Brooklyn’s PS 10 who took the “Sweatshop Workers” tour at the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side were fascinated to learn about the immigrant children who had lived there.

When Rita Fattorusso invites one of her prekindergarten students to the front of the class to lead morning exercises, the other students pay strict attention. If they don’t, they’ll miss their classmate’s instructions: He uses American Sign Language to tell them to do eight jumping jacks, mimicking the action and counting out the number eight on his fingers.

When nearly 4,000 paraprofessionals were threatened with termination in the spring of 2009 for failing to meet certification requirements, the UFT went into high gear to save their jobs. The union held informational meetings in 940 schools and in each borough to help paraprofessionals understand what documentation or certification requirements they were missing and what they had to do.