Lee Gabay, an English teacher in Brownsville, is changing lives one student at a time. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Good morning on this warmer Tuesday. Earlier this month, we asked our readers to nominate candidates for New York Today’s New Yorker of the Year column. (We offered a few suggestions to get the ball rolling.) Since then, we’ve received more than 100 submissions about model citizens who have made a difference — in ways big and small — during 2016. This week, we are highlighting a few of the exemplary (noncelebrity) neighbors you nominated. We look forward to meeting more of them in 2017. And as always, if you would like to share a story, you can write to us at [email protected]. ♦ “Before we go on, I want to congratulate you on finishing a book,” Lee Gabay told his students. “That’s a beautiful thing you did today.” Mr. Gabay, an English teacher at Brooklyn Democracy Academy in the Brownsville section of the borough, was finishing a lecture on John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” Also required reading in his class: “Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur,” by Michael Eric Dyson, which is about the history of hip-hop and race relations in the United States. As far as teachers go, Mr. Gabay, 47, who has a Ph.D. in urban education, is somewhat unconventional. “I loved to learn, but I hated school, always,” Mr. Gabay said, describing himself as having been a class clown. “I think that…more detail
