This Teacher’s Still Learning : Schools: Honored educator at Mission Viejo High enjoys students who make him think.

Jerry Chris, humanities teacher at Mission Viejo High School for the last 15 years, says he finds technology to be a vicious cycle.

“The equipment we now have will be replaced with improved equipment, eventually,” he said. “And I don’t have the time to spare to learn to use the equipment we have now.

“Society needs to be current with technology.”

But Chris must be headed in the right direction; he was recently named Teacher of the Year by the California Assn. for the Gifted.

It’s a “big whoop-de-do,” according to Chris, who received his award last month at a teachers’ convention in Sacramento. There, he made a presentation on the need for teaching classical philosophy at all grade levels, kindergarten through 12th grade.

As befitting a philosopher, Chris says he enjoys students who “make me think.”

“I learn from my students and find that the most refreshing ones are those who are interested and involved.”

Chris is the founder and coordinator of Mission Viejo High’s International Baccalaureate program. It’s a four-year curriculum of honors courses and 100 hours of social service activity, capped by a senior year that includes a 4,000-word thesis and final exams in six subject areas.

Last year, 187 students were enrolled in the school’s IB program, including a state public school record 36 seniors.

On Friday, Chris received another honor when he was named the first president of the newly formed California International Baccalaureate Organization.

Chris, who taught five years at Northview High School in Covina, has apparently found his niche at Mission Viejo. The humanities class, which he team-teaches with Robert Minier and Geri Lesowitz, is open only to seniors and meets for two hours every day.

Topics vary from philosophy and philosophers to social, political and religious issues; from satire and tragedy to civics and morality.

Chris says he presents very few lectures, devoting most of the time to student “inquiries.” Class members are asked to research information, then debate among themselves the moral issues and philosophies that apply.

“The class is a balance between interesting and nuts and bolts,” Chris said.

Among the more “interesting” aspects of the class, according to many of its students, are the guest speakers and field trips.

Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance, has come up the San Diego Freeway from his home in Fallbrook to speak before the class. The class has also played host to Hare Krishna members and to a lawyer whose father was the reputed Mafia godfather of Southern California.

Field trips have included stops at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and such theatrical performances as “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.”

Underclassmen who are thinking about enrolling in humanities, Chris says, should be “willing to be open-minded, to throw away their prejudices, to be skeptical and to go for it 100% . . . achieving nothing less than perfect results.”

“When they graduate, the students from humanities take with them a sense of accomplishment and fond memories.”

Chris, who graduated from Loyola Marymount with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, has been married for 21 years to wife Maureen, an elementary school teacher in Mission Viejo. They have two daughters who attend Mission Viejo High. Amy, 15, is a sophomore, and Julie, 17, is a senior and has her father as one of her teachers.

“It’s no problem having Julie as a member of the class,” Chris said, “because she expects me to be weird.

“But I understand the problems of adolescence,” he says, adding that he believes this to be the quality of any good teacher.