Zabel never got the chance. Six weeks into his sojourn here, he was murdered Sunday, in all probability for an iPod, a life of promise extinguished for a few gigabytes.

On one corner of Zabel's last neighborhood is a Vietnamese auto shop, on another a Mexican bodega. There's a brick-oven pizzeria down the block, the Friendly Lounge up the street. Some rowhouse windows feature Obama placards, others china gewgaws.

It's a South Philadelphia version of the American Dream, except for the bilingual yellow police tape blocking off his street.

Zabel was one of 125 Philadelphia Teaching Fellows, selected from 1,200 applicants. The program, launched in 2005, attracts recent college graduates and career changers, who after other pursuits choose education. Fellows are paid for classroom work while being reimbursed for certification courses.

"We are pushing boundaries to attract new teachers," says Jim Alton, the district's lead recruiter. "These are people who are very passionate about teaching, who come to it by choice. They bring content. They're going through a lot of hoops, showing drive and focus, to become teachers."

Adding diversity

Desmin Daniels was a design engineer at Texas Instruments before entering the first fellows program in 2005. To teach math at Benjamin Franklin High School in Spring Garden, where starting salary is now $41,111, he took a pay cut.

"Half," he says.

"The rewards are worth it. At the end of the day, I'm still happy," says Daniels, 27. "I can put the stress in perspective. The trade-off was an easy one."

He knows that "before students are in a position to learn, they need to feel sort of successful. I like the satisfaction that comes from building relationships and getting a child to change his mind about education, [to see] that it's not boring, it's empowering. Once you do change their minds, the students can be educated."

Lori Bivin of Ponca City, Okla., population 26,000, first trained as an opera singer. Now, the mezzo-soprano sings at Logan Elementary, teaching English as a second language. Most of her students come from Haiti, far from Ponca City.

Music as method

Bivin doesn't sanitize the experience. "There's a lot of stress coming from the outside world," she says. "Not only do my students get frustrated and angry in the classroom, but they have to deal with the world outside of my classroom. It's very aggressive. They're angry."

As Bivin puts it: "They've had a tough shake."

As Harvey Schwartz knows. He became a fellow after careers in mental health and consulting. Now 51, with an MBA, Schwartz teaches autistic children at Bok High School, less than a mile from where Beau Zabel was slain. "There are a lot of challenges," he says, "but with the kids I work with comes a whole level of appreciation."

Today marks the last day of school. In two weeks, Beau Zabel would have begun his training. In September, he would have taught.

Zabel came to the city to make a difference and got far more than a tough shake.

Other teaching fellows will carry on in his stead, training to do the work he aspired to do, helping to make our schools and the city a place better than the one Beau Zabel tragically left.