This student is a true leader, a tri-sport athlete, Science Club president and yearbook editor … Who is this high-achieving Everystudent? My peers and I like to scan the bleachers of our high school amphitheater, guessing the answer, during La Jolla Country Day School’s yearly awards ceremonies. Each time an award is presented, a beloved teacher runs down a list of the student’s most awe-inspiring attributes before revealing the recipient’s name.
After 11 years and countless academic and athletic ceremonies, the feats of the students at this tightly knit high school of fewer than 400 have become more familiar to me, but no less incredible. As a graduating senior attending my final honors convocation, I know whom I want to receive the next award before any announcer takes the podium: my teachers.
But if I listed the qualities that have made their classes grand, you might have trouble telling them apart. All have contributed to my intellectual growth and truly inspired the past four years. Nonetheless, each has left a unique impression. These teachers are just a few of the many I would honor:
Mr. Jonathan Shulman, a man prone to giving tricky pop quizzes and equally surprising renditions of the chorus to “Tradition” from “Fiddler on the Roof,” taught me World History during my senior year, and I also volunteered as a teacher aide to his freshman World Cultures class. If only someone had warned me: to teach about the Neolithic Revolution, Mr. Shulman split the class into hunters and gatherers, then sent each group outside to hunt an “antelope” (himself, and later me), or dig through the lawn for 100 hidden pennies.
Mr. Shulman wanted the class members to think of themselves as participants in history, not passive automatons earning a grade. Thus, lessons regularly took the form of Socratic dialogues, keeping his ninth-grade students relatively engaged through banal geography exercises and an ambitious unit on the legislative branch of government, which Mr. Shulman staunchly taught and re-taught throughout the 2006 Congressional election cycle, even though most curriculums find this topic too complex to broach before the junior year.
However, Mr. Shulman’s best lesson is not taught in his lectures, but rather when a student is goofing off, staring blankly at the posters that cover literally every square inch of classroom wall space and feature historical figures from John F. Kennedy to the Muppets. To catch even the most adept of wandering minds, Mr. Shulman has hidden several white, inconspicuous, sheets of paper that declare “THINK OR DIE” throughout his room.
I know that the underclassmen I saw in Mr. Shulman’s history classes, which so emphasized participation and critical thinking, will be well-prepared for Ms. Sarah Bakhiet, a teacher of the 11th and 12th grades. Discussion in Ms. Bakhiet’s U.S. Government class is no spectator sport. Even when students are not discussing America’s Greco-Roman political system, Ms. Bakhiet expects us to spar like gladiators in a verbal arena, spearing such beastly topics as Congress’s immigration bill, Roe v. Wade and the legal drinking age within our 50-minute class periods. Any longer, and our ears might start bleeding.
Ms. Bakhiet sits at the apex of the Country Day experience, celebrating her senior students’ reasoning abilities by letting the arguments run wild, and then reveling in the enlightened territory we clumsily discover. No matter if, by encouraging a heated dispute between me and my desk-neighbor, she failed to cover all the textbook material; her gesticulations and deep, declaratory voice could easily transcend cement walls to lodge a question about policy-making or legislation in my head even after I had moved to another classroom, in another building.
I am a graduate now, surviving even Ms. Bakhiet’s class without open wounds, but my favorite academic memories come from Ms. Heidi Bruning’s English I class. From my freshman year on, Ms. Bruning reassured her students that we could and should relate to the struggles of such epic heroes as Macbeth, Holden Caulfield and the lost boys of “Lord of the Flies.” Syntactically, she gave me the skill set to organize an argument and craft a thesis. More importantly, when she asked me to analyze a novel, affirm a character’s catharsis or validate an author’s purpose, I began to see meaning in my own, forming life.
There are countless more teachers I would like to commend: Mr. Bruce Boston, who taught me how to compile and edit student poetry into a literary magazine; Mr. Glen Pritzker, who uplifted my mood each morning, though he never had me in class, by smiling and waving to me ” and every other student ” on the quad; la profesora Jaquelin Dutson, who ended her rapid-paced lectures on Spanish literature with the genuinely concerned question, “¿Les ayuda esto? Does this help you?”
I cannot imagine my high school experience without these interactions. The last four years would surely have passed monotonously if the science and language departments came to school just to clock in, or if my success had been measured in yearly standardized tests rather than hugs, admonishments and written comments.
However, outside of my nurturing environs, national high school drop-out rates approach 1 in 3; meanwhile, curriculum innovations in China and India threaten America’s dominant international role, making public school education reforms a key legislative issue for the future. But as the United States strives to achieve higher test scores and face foreign competitors, it should not forget to recognize the teachers, the human aspect of education that resonates much longer than facts and statistics. I won’t.
” Rachel Cromidas is an intern at the La Jolla Village News.