No. 1 Teacher Is Back in the Trenches and Loving It

For the past year, Janis Gabay of San Diego has visited schools across the country and given keynote addresses at education conferences, choking down countless chicken lunches along the way. That’s what happens when you are named the 1990 National Teacher of the Year, a celebrity within the confines of academia.

Along with the tributes came attractive job offers from other parts of the country, including a university teaching position.

But Gabay turned them down, and this week, as students returned to classes at Junipero Serra High School in Tierrasanta, there she was doing what she likes best: teaching English.

“It would have almost been a betrayal of my colleagues to say yes, the classroom is very important, and then to leave it,” said Gabay, who has taught in the San Diego Unified School District since 1973.

“There’s something that happens in a classroom that’s unlike anything else in education,” said the 40-year-old Pacific Beach resident.

That showed Thursday as Gabay glided around her portable classroom in animated discussion with her students.

“Yes, yes, marvelous, yes,” she responded to a student’s particularly creative answer, gesturing broadly with her arms and pointing.

“There’s a rhythm to language that I want you to be sensitive to,” Gabay said to one of her two 12th-grade advanced-placement English classes, snapping her fingers in a steady cadence.

“If anything,” Gabay said of her year as the U.S. Department of Education’s top teacher in the country, “it was a year of affirmation about my career as a teacher. I really missed my classroom a lot, and I really missed my students.”

She spent most of the past year speaking to civic, political, business and education groups on the dynamics of teaching, while observing other model schools and teachers. Now, she is ready to apply her expertise and accumulated knowledge.

“I am really going to come back and push the kids I have. Kids keep you very grounded in reality, and they aren’t very impressed by anything unless you are a basketball star or a rock star or whatever,” Gabay said.

This year she is teaching a batch of students who know her only by her reputation.

“I saw her on MTV this morning,” said ninth-grader Becky Power, who was in Gabay’s 8:30 a.m. class, referring to a public-service spot made by Gabay.

“She’s real enthusiastic, real powerful. She tells you what she wants, and you listen,” said Brian Richardson, a senior.

There were a few raised eyebrows in the beginning.

“I was kind of skeptical at first, that she wouldn’t be as good as she is reputed to be,” said Brian Lazzaro, a 17-year-old senior. “But so far, she has lived up to it.”

Part of her reputation is for assigning homework, her students said. Lots of homework. So far she’s lived up to that, too: Read two books from a list of seven lengthy novels over the summer, and three homework assignments in the first three days of class.

“She told us all the stuff we were going to do, and that kind of scared us,” said Kristen Abell, 17, a senior advanced-placement student.

Gabay said she doesn’t expect her teaching to change, and she plans to use techniques similar to those she used before.

“One of the burdens of this honor is that I am constantly being asked to speak,” she said after she was handed a telephone message from a local high school saying it would like to invite her to speak to the faculty.

When she received the National Teacher of the Year award, Gabay wasn’t sure she would return to her school, and even now she isn’t sure she will be at Serra High a year from now.

“They say this award sort of changes you, and I think they are right,” Gabay said. “If you ask me if I’ll be here a year from now, I don’t know, and that sort of unsettles me. I feel that I should have that wired, but I don’t.”

Among other things, Gabay would like to go back to school for a doctorate in English.

Although, while visiting North Carolina, Gabay was offered a position in East Carolina University’s English education department, “maybe the bottom line is that nobody offered me something so out of this world to give up everything and go,” she said.