Golden Apple Awards 2002 - High School

Welcome to the 7th Annual Golden Apple Awards. The Golden Apple Foundation of New Mexico is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the standards and stature of the teaching profession and to improving the quality of education in New Mexico through its fellows and scholars' initiatives. Join us in celebrating this year's Golden Apple Fellows. Both of us on you starts with you eternally, it starts right there in your home in

your community. Beverly makes every student feel important because I think in her eyes they really are. She's not trying to sell them something, this is something that she's convinced of in her own mind and you know the child really is important. It was my freshman year and everybody knows how scary it is to be in high school your freshman year and it was after lunch, it was after lunch and she came up and I was so lost I did not know where to go and she looked at my schedule and she she showed me where to go and ever since then we never really talked or anything but she always said hi and it always seemed like if I needed something she would always be there.

When I first saw her that was mean and I got to know her and she was all nice and kind and caring and loving and helpful. Her people skills are excellent, she feels very well with the classroom teacher, she's good at putting them at ease, makes them feel that she's not there to use her their power. She also makes the child feel very comfortable and is adept at not singling that child out but will work with the entire class so that there's no special child in the class everybody is perceived as benefiting from her service. I chose to do a class sponsorship and this is my fifth year where I've done that so that I could gain exposure to the student and get to know them better. We have a lot of activities that we do together and we have to work in session stands and

there's not a lot of money and we put on prom and soon we'll be putting on graduation which takes a lot of time and money but through all of that I've gotten to meet a lot of new people, a lot of new kids here in town, that's why I do it because we know it only pays for 200 bucks a year and it's not about money, it's about getting to know them. Are you familiar with the phrase, a person can't see the force for the trees, you've heard that? Mr. Blackstone has received this award for several reasons, one, he is a very dedicated teacher, I'm an early riser so I get to work pretty early and Kevin is here before

me a lot of mornings, setting up labs, setting up his room and he's here late, he's very dedicated, he's the teacher you want your child to be in that class because he cares about each kid and he wants them to succeed. To me education is not of much value unless it's more than just simply memorization of facts and so if I can get them to see the importance and the value of what they're learning then they get excited about it because it's not just memorization for the sake of doing well on a test but for the sake of applying it to their lives and making better decisions for them as an individual. Well Mr. Blackstone is a very special teacher because he not only has an expansive knowledge of biology which is awesome but he has really gets into humor which makes the class a lot of fun, even for students whose biology maybe isn't their aptitude per se, he makes the class awesome. He always includes far side cartoons and the notes that he prints out for us and they're always very nice.

I do try to incorporate a sense of humor into my teaching. What disease did you think this was? We have good kids, these students every day amaze me, they're citizenship, how well they're prepared, what their goals are, even the kid who gets in trouble is a good kid. High level students are highly motivated, they're a really good group of kids. I do think the goal of education is to prepare students to be valuable members of the society and not simply to memorize information and so that's my goal as a teacher is to get students to think and sometimes I don't want to think. Sometimes I try to get them to do things that they're not comfortable doing but I think in the long run they do see the benefit of that and so as a teacher that's kind of my primary goal. Look at the chart shown here and jot down the phrases that describe what you think your reaction would be, if you've been through this before you may not have to put what you

think, you can put what your feelings were. The reason I feel Margaret Harris deserves the Golden Apple Award is because she's a complete educator. It's not that she's just a great teacher, she's a great person. I've known Margaret for over 10 years. I first met her when she was a student at Bindet, Eastern of Mexico University and she took a graduate class from me. Some students you can forget, you can't forget Margaret. She was a person that left you like you learned something, you know, I hope she learned something from me but I always felt like I learned something from her and she gave me a lot of great ideas, I don't know if she knows that to this day. One of a kind, you need to look at that prefix, you need means one, one of a kind. This Harris is a grammar in her English, the way she teaches. She tries to be a perfectionist and this is the way she always cracks herself and cracks us, has helped me and the way I speak, the way I write my English papers, that's how she has helped me. My philosophy of life, I guess, is just living. I just think they need to see as much of life, do as much of life as they can possibly do. That's why we all here encourage them to take part in all these activities that we have

at our school and push them in our classes and offer them as many opportunities we can. Being isolated as we are, you sometimes have to work around that and figure out all trying to ways of doing it, like to expose them to art and to music, just want them to see things that maybe they haven't seen before, experience all they can experience so that they know what's out and they're out there in the world. From my classes, I want them to be able to go out into the world and do anything that they want to do and not be held back by lack of knowledge, lack of education, lack of training and skills. You know, it would break my heart to have a student say, I wanted to do this or follow this career, take that job, but I didn't know how to do it, I couldn't do the writing it took, I couldn't do the public speaking. Every door that they want to go through, I want to open to them. I don't want any doors locked because we haven't met their needs here. We measured oxygen consumption and what did that tell us about the gerbil?

What were we measuring as a result of oxygen consumption? Basel Metabolic, right? Mr. Nicholson is not only a teacher and a mentor, but he's also a friend. You can come to him with any question and he always has an answer and if he doesn't have an answer, he'll find you one and he also does it with a sense of humor. Should I draw a Popeye arm again? All right, so draw a Popeye arm, okay? And then here's fingers, okay? I think it might just be a town, he has to tell us what's going on with the students and you can always tell like that when people are getting it or not and it never makes you feel like stupid or like that you can't get it because he goes slow enough that everyone can understand it but it's not dragging down the people that do understand it. My expectations are kind of twofold. I of course want them to learn the subject material but more importantly I want them to come away with a desire to be a learner, to continue learning about maybe some of the

topics that we've talked about in class or maybe to see an article about science in the newspaper or magazine and be interested enough to pick it up and read it and continue that search for knowledge I guess that desire to keep learning after they've left my classroom. And to give you another example of why he is a true teacher, he's been at all levels, he's been a coordinator of the AP program, he's been an assistant principal, he's done many things, his love is to be in the classroom and to teach the kids and I think that anybody that comes out of this classroom or anybody that goes in and sees him sees that immediately. He loves to teach and that's what he does best is teach. I tried the administrative end of education two different ways. Those are important jobs and they were rewarding in their own right but to me the opportunity to work with young people on a daily basis to see him grow, to see him learn, to see

them go from being sophomores to basically adults and to contribute to that in a positive life. And it's to me more reality, teaching it's not what I do, it's what I am. Some of her other students that have her in her yearbook class, they think she's the

most interesting teacher here. One of my friends who's on the softball team said that, ask me once if I thought school would be boring if Ms. Purace wasn't here and I told her yes, she agreed with me too. So she does make it, she does liven it up around here. Hey hey, that's all you coming up in life, what happened? Higher. You're going to find your girlfriend's leaving you alone so you can get some beauty wraps. What she does is our school is 99% Navajo students and with those students she brings it as much culture as possible and that's what we want to do. We want to help those students and their families understand that the world is a big place but the roots of the Navajo people go back thousands of years and that's what's important to them and so we want to meld both cultures.

Where is she live? She lives one in the edge of the woods and that's what I do. I go in and I guess I just really respect their culture. I don't try to be a part of it. I'm not a want to be. I just admire it, I respect it and I want the kids to be very proud of who they are because they have a very steep tradition, they have a very beautiful culture and I don't want them to forget that. And I don't want them to emulate somebody else's culture. I want them to take the best of what is in their culture and bring it with them wherever they go. That you've already written? Her English class is really different than other English class because we do art projects and there's a lot of different things that we do. Well I remember doing it, I remember drawing it or working with it and then that leads me back to remembering what she taught me or what she was teaching that day. That's how art projects help me out with the English class. I want them to be lifelong learners, I want them to be critical thinkers, I want them

to love literature as passionately as I do, I want them to be able to express themselves in the oral and written mode. I want them to be able to go anywhere in the world, whether it be college or the military or whether they get married and have children of their own. I want them to be able to stand on their own two feet and compete in the global community and I know that they can do it. I don't know, you've got to think about it and discuss it. Some people I can guarantee you in this country would say that's the way it should be. This one is a lot different from other teachers. She helped us learn a lot more easily. We got to write poems like if we were in the Holocaust and that really brought out emotion and stuff and that helped me understand more about the Holocaust.

My hopes and I guess dreams for my students when they sit in my classes are one that they learn, historical knowledge and that they think history has a place in their own lives. When you hit 20th century and the latter part of the 1800s is a lot easier than when you're doing the Greeks and the Romans but when you do the Greeks and the Romans you also have times and things that the Greeks and the Romans did that have influenced us and who we are today. And so that will become this rule or this allowance. We told you we were going to do it. Susan is kind of a person that students like to attend or to her classes because they know that she's sincere about what she's teaching due to the fact that she has spent so much time working with students outside of the regular work day and working with beginning teachers and working with community members to be able to have successful programs in our school. It is a wonderful recognition for our school.

I think it brings to life that teachers here care. I've been extremely lucky as a teacher. There was a national endowment for the Humanity Scholar and I was able to study at Harvard one summer or same group one to Russia the next summer and I was able to bring back photos and experiences from there. It's really like seeing history more than just a picture in their mind but have slides and ideas of what these places and things are about and I think that's one of the main reasons I was able to win this award is that I try to influence children to like learning. The real grasp of why they were able to win this award is that you can come up with the four plans, the two elevations and then all can you agree on those particular. He has an ability to appeal to each student so that they actually reach to their goal

regardless of what the level is or what their personal goals are. What's special about Mr. Sark is the way he teaches. It's more of a hands-on type of path. The biggest aim of mine for a high school student is to find out the world of knowledge, the information we get, the skills, the tools that we learn can be used in a lifetime the way they approach life, the way they enjoy life themselves, and they're happy about themselves that they've got a good self-esteem built up by doing things that they've accomplished themselves. Real world situations I love to put within this class. The biggest challenge I have in these particular students is they come in to class with a preconceived idea of what education is all about. When they come into this particular class it's an active type of learning where they take

responsibility for their own education. They have to solve the situation. They have to find that it's not a step one, step two, step three. They see the final result or where we have to arrive at and they begin to make up their steps and they begin to understand what the sequence of events are to complete a particular task. He currently teaches in one classroom, an architecture class, a building trades class, an ADP math class, landscape class, all at the same time. How I keep things straight within the classroom is difficult. I'm running around constantly doing certain things and illustrating certain skills to different students and where I go outside, work with the construction kids and I come inside and work with the architects or the young engineers and the computers and it's a real life situation. We have lots of different activities in our lives and I like the kids to see me go from

one setting to another setting. So Michael wants you to start off? We get along with everybody. He teaches us not only like just how to do what we're supposed to be doing here but like try to get along with other people and just get along with each other. When you say thank you or when you say please to people, they know that you're concerned about them and they'll go great distances in their jobs and the opportunities they'll be giving us at adults. Constantly reminding students that courtesy, polite manners will give them a long ways. Excuse me, kid. When they say goodbye to me, they really do mean they had a great day. Thank you.

Thank you.