Golden Apple Winners Identical at the Core: Dedicated to Students

Jim Cross was keeping an eye on his watch Saturday as he accepted hugs, handshakes and congratulations after a breakfast program honoring him and three others with Orange County Teacher of the Year awards.

Not long after the plaques and gold apples had been distributed, Cross had a plane to catch. His destination: Sacramento, where he will be interviewed as one of four finalists for the state Teacher of the Year award.

It was clearly a heady honor for Cross, a Los Alamitos history and future studies teacher who has been known to dress like a trench soldier for a lecture on World War I and to assign students to build a mock-up of the Great Wall for a lesson on China’s history. If he wins the state’s Teacher of the Year competition this week, he will be in contention for the national title.

County Board Program

Cross was feted by the Orange County Board of Education at UC Irvine, along with Barbara Regosin, a special education teacher in the Irvine Unified School District; James W. Bailey, a vocational agricultural instructor in the Fullerton Union High School District, and Carrie Luger Slayback, a fourth-grade teacher in the Fountain Valley School District. Sixteen other Teacher of the Year nominees also were honored at the ceremony.

Cross, 38, said that while appearing in class dressed as King Tut or Martin Luther has “an enlivening effect” on students, he only does it about half a dozen times a year “or it loses its effect.” (Other characters in his repertoire include an archeologist for his history class and Mork of the “Mork and Mindy” television show for future studies students.)

‘Give All You’ve Got’

“Learning by doing, for me, makes a lot more sense,” said Cross, explaining that most ninth-grade history students are taking his class because it is required, not for love of the subject. So he tried to find ways of making the lessons have staying power, he said.

“I’ve never heard any kid come back to me years later and say, ‘Gee, that was a great lecture.’ But there have been kids who remember what went into building that Great Wall of China,” Cross added.

Teaching with a flair for the unusual fits into his professional philosophy, which he says is “give all you’ve got every day.

“Have high expectations of your students. Demand that they shoot for the stars. But you’ve got to do it by example, through love, through energy, whatever it takes,” he said. “I have my bad days. But if you love them and care for them, they know it. . . . They work hard because of it.”

For Sunny Hills High School agriculture instructor James W. Bailey, teaching has not yet grown stale, even after 27 years in the business. “With what I teach, something different happens every day,” he said.

Born and raised on a farm outside Kansas City, Bailey decided to become a teacher so he could combine his interest in agriculture with his love of working with people. Today he teaches students how to raise animals and how to manage crops, knowing few of them will aspire to owning their own farms.

“The jobs are in agricultural business. It’s difficult to encourage anyone to go into producing today,” he said, alluding to the financial crisis facing small farmers across the nation.

“But we need agricultural economists and politicians. We need bright, good people to go into this. We all like to eat,” he said. “Overproduction is just as much of a problem as underproduction.” Advances must be made in agricultural engineering, equipment and international relations “if we’re going to survive as a world,” Bailey said.

Doesn’t See Much Change

He has been known to help students raise money to buy lambs or piglets for class projects, and he has the opinion that the average student has not changed over the years. “There’s only different bodies, hair styles and clothes,” he said. “They still have the same desires and wants.”

While Bailey, himself, no longer has to get up to milk cows, he is still a farmer. He has a Christmas tree farm in north Orange County.

Special education instructor Barbara Regosin said she takes great delight in teaching basic skills to developmentally and learning disabled students at Turtle Rock Elementary School.

“They appreciate being able to learn something so much, and they express it,” Regosin said. “They are as excited about learning a skill as I am to teach it. That’s very rewarding.”

Regosin said she has been interested in working with the disabled since she was a child, when she spent summers helping at camps for the physically handicapped. She and the other teachers in Irvine Unified School District’s program for the disabled “have a vision for each student to be a functioning member of the community. Everything is geared to that.”

‘Not Unlike Other Children’

Regosin teaches skills such as reading, telling time and money management, and her students eventually go on to learn skills that allow them to work in food service and assembly lines, she said.

“These children are not unlike other children, except it takes them a little longer,” she said. But she scoffs at the common misconception that special education teachers have an unusually high reserve of patience. “It just appears that way,” she said with a laugh.

For the fourth-grade students of Cox Elementary School teacher Carrie Luger Slayback, water conservation has been a recurrent lesson.

They’ve written slogans and poetry about it, lectured before service clubs and even performed a musical play about water shortages. Slayback’s inspiration for the class projects was a contest sponsored by the Municipal Water District of Orange County. The prize, a free trip to Knott’s Berry Farm, provided the motivation to her classes, which have won the contest three consecutive years. Her efforts also gained her a Disneyland Service Award.

Boosts Public Education

Slayback believes she is no different than other teachers she works with “except I just started having my classes communicate with the outside world, by entering contests. And I don’t hesitate to tell people how good public education is,” she said.

Most critics of public schools do not know what goes on in a classroom, Slayback said. “Anybody who spent any amount of time in a classroom would have respect for someone who does it every day, managing 30 children, stimulating them and effecting change.”

But it is not a chore, she said.

“I think all four of us,” Slayback said, referring to the award winners, “think it’s fun to go in to work every day.”