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2008
Annie Torres Rodriguez
San Francisco USD
Annie Torres Rodríguez was born in Tulare, California where her love for teaching began as a teaching assistant at an elementary school where she attended kindergarten through eighth grades. As the second child of eight, she was inspired to be a classroom teacher from the onset of her first job as a teenager. Her mother, Rachel, and her older brother Carlos Jr, a high school special education teacher, motivated Annie to further her education and give back to the community, as César Chávez had taught in his life here on earth.
2007 Teacher of the Year
Ana Hernández
Valley Center-Pauma USD
My views on teaching reflect my everyday experiences in the classroom. My lessons are child-centered, so that I can reflect every student’s potential through meaningful contexts. I accept who they are, and what they add to our community of learners. Their native language and culture are valued as we learn about our families and heritage languages. The goal in my classroom reflects the TWBI design to become bilingual, biliterate, reach high academic standards, and appreciate a multicultural society. I believe in social justice and equity for my students at high school and in their community. I advocate for my students’ educational rights and advancement in their instructional program. It’s important how my students succeed across other curricular areas and in all aspects of a middle school environment. At CSUM, I treat my college students with the same respect and rights, for they also need a supportive learning environment that models effective practices and fairness for all learners. They will need to implement a pedagogy that is active, challenging, meaningful, balanced, rich, and relevant to the students’ identity and linguistic needs.
Books cannot adequately describe how to become an effective teacher. Teaching in a bilingual setting requires experiential knowledge of how children learn and view themselves through the process of two languages. A bilingual teacher builds meaningful relationships and learns from his/her students. I celebrate my students’ accomplishments in their native or second language, whether it is a small gain in reading or a large risk in writing. I accept their performance and make them feel secure at taking chances. The words of writer, Maya Angelou, presents this best, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The impact of how I accommodate the cognitive and language levels, diverse needs, and self-confidence of my students is empirical to the quality of bilingual education skills a child needs, regardless of age, race, gender, religion, or socioeconomic status.
2007 Distinguished
George Herrera
Rowland USD
Growing up in border towns gave me an early appreciation for the necessity of being bilingual. I grew up developing my bilingual skills while helping my mother sell toys and clothes at the swap meet. My life was further enriched by my missionary work in Southeast Asia as well as my ability to speak, with different degrees of proficiency, a variety of languages. One evening in Singapore, while struggling to communicate with children in a Vietnamese Refugee Camp, I understood profoundly the universality of being human and the important role languages play in deepening the human experience. I believe that primary language literacy is a basic right of human existence. It provides human beings access to the respective customs, traditions, and values of their culture. Being bilingual affords individuals the opportunity to keep their grandparents roots alive while being part of the English tide. To deny children literacy in their primary language is to deny them access to the traditions, customs, and values of their culture. In short, it is to deny them the essence of who they are and the potential of who they could be. It is inhumane, it is cruel, and it is wrong! To disallow human beings the language to access their culture is to uproot them. Biology has taught us when a plant is uprooted, it immediately goes into shock, for it is no longer connected to the soil that nurtures the intricacies of its root system. Immersing it in water does not compensate for uprooting it nor does it ensure its survival. The metaphor is obvious!
2007 Distinguished
Jorge Ruíz
Stockton City USD
“We don’t need bilingual programs at school, we need to mainstream the students. If I learned the English language in one semester without the help of bilingual classes, they can do it too” that is what I used to think about bilingual education. On my first experience in a classroom my point of view about bilingual education changed. I worked with a teacher that had students from different nationalities. Even though there were six Hispanic students in her classroom she assigned me to work with a Cambodian girl. I didn’t speak Hmong language; she did not speak neither Spanish nor English. I had a difficult time teaching her the sounds, but I was able to succeed , at the end of the first trimester she was able to decode and read her first words. Meanwhile the Hispanic students were being yelled at in their faces because they did not understand their teacher. They got bored and became a behavior problem in the classroom. I offered to help them during recess or lunchtime. But she told me there were no materials available in Spanish for them. One day I was surprised to find the Hispanic students sitting around a table with their materials in Spanish. The teacher told me, the Bilingual Review Team is coming, if they ask you about your group tell them that you had been working with them. Since that day I kept working with them and they began to do their work and improve academically in both languages. Their attitude changed to the point that the teacher recognized her mistake of not providing academic services that they needed.
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