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 Northwest teachers recognized for their excellence find new ways to challenge themselves and their students Story by Michael Tevlin
Case in point: Fulmer incorporated a schoolwide diversity theme into a solo and ensemble contest. Making music together requires tolerance for other people, Fulmer says. And tolerance starts with each child understanding what makes her or him unique. So in addition to singing, learning to read music, and preparing for the contest, Fulmer's students at Sumner Junior High School create diversity journals, discuss diversity in class, learn about different musical styles, and study music from diverse cultures. One homework assignment calls for students to monitor an assigned radio station to analyze the song playlist. All this activity is par for the course for Fulmer and her students. In addition to teaching 175 students in four sections of chorus and choir, Fulmer serves as K-12 music coordinator for the 7,200-student Sumner School District. She also directed the 325-member All Northwest High School Honor Choir, culminating in a concert for 3,000 parents and music directors at the Music Educators Northwest Conference this spring. Fulmer prepared 100 students for extracurricular competitions, including working with two of her students who were selected to sing in the National Honor Choir. She also serves as an officer in the American Choral Directors Association. All this takes energy, which happens to be one of Fulmer's criteria for anyone considering teaching at her level. That, and a love for children. "You have to be the kind of person who has tenacity, who has the energy and strength to sort out what's important, and the drive to want to be there for kids," Fulmer says. Being there for her students and watching them succeed keeps Fulmer coming back. "For me, it's recognizing the progress the kids make," she says. "In the middle grades, sometimes it feels like we take two steps forward, then it's a step back. "But every day I stop and think: I have the power to influence what happens in this classroom. How the kids view themselves. How they view learning. How they view whether what they're doing is meaningful. I try to focus on that every day." 
"Too many students today have bought into mediocrity," says Oregon's 1997 Teacher of the Year. "They think that it's OK to just get by with the bare minimum." So Morishita, who coaches boys' track in addition to teaching biology at Clackamas High School in Milwaukie, sets the mark higher. In a field where "satisfactory" is often equated with "good enough," Morishita has drawn a line. Daily, he asks each of his students to hurdle it. "For me it's an ongoing battle," says the veteran of 18 years in the classroom. Morishita's strong background in the liberal arts has helped him take a wide view of science education into the classroom. His general biology students learn to apply the disciplines of scientific inquiry and legal process to real-life problems. They role-play lawyers and judges, grappling with legal and ethical issues such as genetic engineering, life-prolonging medical technology, and the teaching of creation science. Students must research and use precedent-setting case law to support their arguments and rulings. "I try to make the subject relevant by tying into social responsibility and how that affects us as future citizens," Morishita says. "We're not only learning about science, we're also learning how it affects us in society." In Morishita's biology labs, students learn to hypothesize, to inquire into how and why things happen, and to experiment. Morishita decries traditional labs that use what he calls a "cookbook" approach to science. Such labs, he notes, follow a rote formula that stifles student inquiry. "'This is what you do,'" Morishita says, mimicking the formulaic approach in these labs, "'and these are the results you get.' It's ridiculous to think we're really accomplishing science." Instead, Morishita's students learn what he calls the "Three Ps" of science: problem posing, problem solving, and peer persuasion. For example, a student may hypothesize that test taking causes anxiety. To prove her hypothesis, she runs an experiment on several groups of students, then reaches a conclusion based on her findings. But the student-scientist's work is not complete. "You're not really doing science unless you can persuade your peers that your work is valid," Morishita says. His biology students must present their findings to the class as a final step. Morishita's emphasis on academic rigor springs from his belief that educators play a vital role in preparing the citizens of the future. And the future is a concern for Morishita, who has witnessed a decline in respect for education among students. Morishita believes the need for excellent teachers is greater than ever. "The contribution that a teacher can make now is probably unprecedented. We know so much more about the way students learn, how they perform, how we stack up against other countries." Morishita's background as a coach spills over to his role as a teacher. "I guess it's the coach in me coming out," he says. "Somehow I have this inherent sense that this is something I was meant to do. It's the challenge of how many kids can you get motivated to work at their true potential, striving to do the best they can, never being satisfied with doing a mediocre job."
She landed in Anchorage, but left to work as a bookkeeper for an Alaskan native corporation in Aniak, a village on the Kuskokwim River about 150 miles Northeast of Bethel. In her early days in Alaska, Kuhn admits that teaching was not what she had in mind. In fact, she says she got into education completely by chance. But 21 years after going north, Alaska's 1997 Teacher of the Year looks back over her life and wouldn't have it any other way. Just living in Alaska's bush is an adventure in itself. "I've always wanted to live in a log cabin by a river, and that's the life I have now," Kuhn says. Kuhn entered teaching through the back door. In Aniak, word got around that Kuhn enjoyed arts and crafts. Before long, she found herself teaching art once a week at the local school. Kuhn decided to get her teaching certificate at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Her first teaching assignment was north of Aniak in the Yukon River town of Holy Cross. Thirteen years ago, Kuhn took her current job teaching kindergarten and first grade in McGrath, a village of 500 farther up the Kuskokwim. McGrath sports a post office, a Federal Aviation Administration weather station, an Alaska Commercial Co. store, a liquor store, a road house, and a lodge and café. It's a big town by Alaskan bush standards. Kuhn walks to school every day along snow-packed roads. School starts at 9 a.m., except when it's more than 46 degrees below zero. On those days—it was more than 50 below for a week and half in December—students come to school at noon, when it "warms up." Kuhn uses her art background to create a fun and stimulating classroom that builds on international and other themes. For example, to celebrate the Chinese New Year (she taught English in China for a year), Kuhn hung a giant paper dragon from the rafters. Students learned to write Chinese calligraphy characters. They said hello and goodbye in Chinese. They danced the Chinese ribbon dance and ate Chinese food they'd cooked. At the start of the year, Kuhn's farm and ranching unit had students roping sawhorse "steers," milking powdered-milk-filled latex gloves on sawhorse "cows," dancing square and Western dances, and watching a real rodeo rider demonstrate roping. "It's like I'm a kid again," Kuhn says. "I try to coordinate everything I can." All the fun masks Kuhn's serious intent. She focuses on cooperative learning, self-esteem, and working together in teams. "We're not teaching just core subjects anymore," she notes. "It's drug and alcohol awareness, sexually transmitted diseases, smoking, and making children aware of choices." When she returns at the end of the day to her cabin, Kuhn smiles to think of her adopted home. "I think you have to be able to put down roots somewhere," Kuhn says. "It's only by being willing to stay and make changes that change can happen." Kuhn sees school as an integral part of her students' futures. "It's in the classroom," she says, "where the future begins."
Later, in high school, an inspirational teacher used storytelling to breath life into history for Francis. Finally, in college, the memory of those stories--and of the people who told them--led Francisto choose a teaching career. Today, the 48-year-old Francis is just as excited about history. Except these days, he's the one telling the stories. "Even before I student taught, I realized I'd been working on the concept of teaching history for a long time," Francis says. As a history teacher at Idaho Falls High School and ldaho's 1997 Teacher of the Year, Francis uses history as a way to teach skills that will serve students the rest of their lives. "I love history because it's a subject that allows me to set the issue and encourage the students to grapple with it," Francis says. For example, when Francis was listening to a lecture last summer on the history of the Bosnian conflict, he couldn't help but see ways to incorporate lessons into his classes. "I was getting all kinds of ideas for setting up a village in my classroom made up of students role-playing Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, and the dynamics that village is going to have to deal with," Francis says. This year, Francis' classes include World Civilizations—an elective course he wrote and developed himself—two U.S. history sections, and an advanced placement U.S. history class. He's also team-teaching an interdisciplinary history-English class that explores the themes of triumph and tragedy. In the interdisciplinary class, Francis combines two passions that at first may seem contradictory: planning and improvisation. But planning is where creativity can be applied, Francis says. Once the class has been planned, then it's fun to be open to spontaneity in the classroom. "We do a lot of role playing where the students act out anything from being Henry Ford to being attorneys at the Scopes Monkey Trial," Francis says. "What they will come up with in their creative presentations, sometimes your mouth will just drop open." Francis gets excited, not only about the history his students are learning, but the skills they're developing along the way. "Schools should teach skills that will open doors for students," he says. "Not just job skills. But the skill to think logically and defend an idea, the skill to analyze somebody's else's idea, the skill to write, the skill to make comparisons, to draw analogies. Particularly in history and English, we're not just training students for jobs, we're training students to be active members of a democratic society." For Francis, the joy of teaching history goes back to that eight-year-old sitting on the edge of a log around the campfire. "I had a student who once said to me, 'I learned a lot in this class, even though I didn't want to.' And that says a whole lot about what I'm trying to do. That it could be so exciting that, even though you didn't want to do any work, you still wanted to be there, and you still learned a lot."
Call it math anxiety. Math illiteracy. One expert even coined the term "innumeracy," says Girard, a veteran of 17 years in the classroom. Whatever it's called, this phobia of things numerical is a call to arms for math teachers like Girard. "One of my goals in life is to help students overcome math anxiety," she says. Girard's antidote includes large doses of problem solving, active student participation, learning by doing, and appealing to a variety of learning styles. For example, students in Girard's junior and senior classes at Glasgow High School read articles about mathematics. They write essays. They collect and analyze cartoons that use math principles. They explain their answers to problems. And they demonstrate what they've learned in much different ways than their parents ever did. "In the arts, students can play a solo, or they sing a song, or create a piece of pottery," Girard says. "In math, all we've had are tests." The trouble with many tests, Girard says, is they tell a teacher what a student doesn't know, rather than showing what a student can do. So Girard's students do projects. For example, one project called for students to predict the changing hours of daylight over the year. Students collected data on certain days, then developed a formula that could be applied to predict the amount of daylight on any given day. To teach the concept of calculating probabilities, Girard's students designed their own carnival games. As a reward at the end of the unit, they spent the final class playing the games. Another class studied functions using a fictional ostrich farm. Students calculated egg production, expenses, and profit-and-loss statements. "Rather than doing only what is called drill and kill, students need to learn in the context of a problem that has to be solved," Girard says. Students retain more when they connect what they've learned with real-life examples. "When asking the kids to recall functions, I'll remind them of the ostriches," Girard says. Girard also sees value in the emerging tools available to math students. If music students can use their clarinets and saxophones to make music, Girard reasons that math students can use their calculators to do mathematics. "We use calculators every day," she says. "It's made more math accessible to a greater range of students." Prominently displayed above Girard's desk is a poster with the statement, "The ultimate goal of teaching is to enable those taught to get along without the teacher." For Girard, the poster sums up her teaching philosophy. "I'm trying to make myself obsolete," she says. "Twenty years from now, I don't want to hear any former students apologize because they can't balance a checkbook." Michael Tevlin is a freelance writer, communication consultant, and musician living in Portland, Oregon. Photo: Karen Fulmer, Washington Teacher of the Year, is surrounded by the girls' chorus at Sumner Junior High School. Photo by Tony Kneidek.
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or Karen Fulmer, Washington's 1997 Teacher of the Year, teaching music is a vehicle to transport students to new worlds of self-discovery.
"While teachers may specialize, I don't think they can say about themselves, 'I am a music teacher, I am a science teacher, I am a math teacher,'" says Fulmer, who has taught for 21 years. "You have to think of yourself first as a teacher of students. And I think you have to draw as much as you can from the other subject areas and work on their integration, because this is how our world operates."
Ford Morishita looks at student achievement the way a track coach looks at the high jump: There's always room for raising the bar.
When Judy Kuhn was 23 years old and looking for adventure, she headed north to Alaska from her native Washington state.
Jim Francis has had a long-standing love affair with history. As an eight-year-old at Grand Teton National Park, Francis recalls listening intently over the crackle of a campfire to a park ranger's story about the mountain men and fur trappers of the Yellowstone country.
Kimberley Girard can see it coming. It's that "can-we-change-the-subject" look she gets from people when she tells them she teaches mathematics. "I can almost see some of these people back up," says Girard, Montana's 1997 Teacher of the Year.
