Long Beach : 3 Will Be Honored Friday as Teachers of the Year
The Long Beach Unified School District has named three instructors as its 1992 teachers of the year. The honorees are Christine Maddalone, an elementary language arts teacher; Phyllis Goodwin, a seventh-grade social studies teacher, and Barbara Seelgen, a high school English teacher.
Maddalone’s principal called her a 24-hour-a-day teacher. “I know because I get calls from her at 10 o’clock at night,” Whittier Elementary School Principal Randy Ward said. “She internalizes in all her students the belief that they must be the best they can be by remembering never ever to give up.”
Goodwin, who works at Jefferson Middle School, became a teacher after starting her family, helping to put her husband through college and then going to night school to earn her own degree. “I have had so much fun, learned so many new things, and am still learning,” Goodwin said. “I only wish I could have become a teacher earlier.”
In 26 years of teaching, Lakewood High’s Seelgen estimated she has touched the lives of about 4,000 students. “I am constantly updating my skills,” she said, “for I know I cannot meet the challenges of the 1990s unless I am up-to-the-minute with my techniques. There is no other profession more exciting or worthwhile than teaching.”
The instructors will be honored Friday at an awards luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Long Beach.
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