Countywide : Four Teachers Go to Head of the Class

When it comes to Orange County’s four nominees for 1993 California Teacher of the Year, their principals bubble over with praise.

Alrene Kay Allan uses enthusiasm and the cartoon beagle Snoopy with her Anaheim second-graders to make “the highest achievers, the lowest achievers and even students who can’t speak English a part of her lesson,” said Mary Austad, Paul Revere Elementary School’s vice principal.

Patricia Carey’s reputation for teaching second- and third-graders at Buena Park’s Gordon H. Beatty Elementary School is such that “parents literally line up to get their children into her class,” Principal George Cottrell said.

Manuel Hernandez, a fine arts and math teacher at Santa Ana’s Valley High School, “is a wonderful role model for our student body, which is 90% Hispanic, and we love to have somebody here that they can identify with,” Principal Bob Nelson said.

David Houston, a science teacher at Mission Viejo’s Fred Newhart Middle School, “is the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave in the afternoon, and in between his whole focus is kids,” Principal James Henderson said.

The four were selected this week as the county’s nominees by a six-member screening panel composed of business leaders and heads of university teachers education departments.

Their names will be sent to the California Department of Education, which selected La Habra kindergarten teacher Maria Azucena Vigil as 1992 California Teacher of the Year.

Allan, who is beginning her 30th year as a teacher, said she uses Snoopy to reinforce lessons on self-esteem, responsibility and being kind to others.

Her top students are named “Snoopy Scholars,” and at the end of the year the children put on a 90-minute song-and-dance review called the “Snoopy Follies,” which highlights all that they have learned, including math and science.

“I teach using a hands-on approach,” she said. “For example, the students get a goldfish when we talk about goldfish, and apples when we talk about Johnny Appleseed.”

Carey, who has taught nine years, has an approach called “Activities Integrating Math and Science,” which uses rotating themes to teach students all of their subjects. For example, an upcoming theme is “light.”

She said students will read a book about a girl who shows a friend how mirrors deflect light. In science, a spectrum will be used to show that white light is made up of all the colors of the rainbow. In art, the students will make kaleidoscopes.

“It’s a very comprehensive way of teaching, and it’s done in a fun form,” she said.

Hernandez, a former college instructor who has been at Valley High seven years, organized the school’s 25-member folklorico dance troupe, though “I can’t dance even one step,” he said.

Hernandez said that as a victim of discrimination as a child growing up in Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s, he knows how important it is for minority children to have something, such as dancing, at which they excel.

“They will feel good about themselves physically and mentally and that means they will do well in their studies,” he said.

Houston, who has taught for 17 years, has a classroom menagerie featuring five snakes, two opossums and numerous frogs, lizards and rats, which he uses to get the attention of his seventh-graders.

“For example, I can show them the legless lizard and compare it to a snake,” Houston said. “One of the characteristics of a snake is that it has no legs, but this animal has ears and eyelids, which makes it a lizard. . . . Something like that in a book, they wouldn’t read it. But if they can touch it, they’ll see it.”