VENTURA : Aline Grossman Is Teacher of the Year

Ventura teacher Aline Yee Grossman speaks five languages, can choreograph a dance troupe and has traveled around the world.

And school officials cite her wide-ranging knowledge to explain why Grossman beat out many more experienced educators to be named Ventura County’s 1994 Teacher of the Year.

But the fifth-grade children in Grossman’s class at Will Rogers School say there’s an even more important reason why Grossman’s a good teacher.

“She’s very kind to everybody,” Adam Lopez, 10, said.

Nominated by parents and selected by a panel of county educators, Grossman learned this week about the honor. She will represent the county’s 5,500 public school teachers in a state competition for Teacher of the Year next month. “I’m still kind of in shock,” she said.

Now 40, Grossman came to teaching late.

After graduating from UCLA in 1974, she first worked as an Italian interpreter on an American cruise ship, then spent five years producing dance for a Los Angeles group that works with poor children.

She worked for one year in a Mexican orphanage before moving to Europe to teach dance for four years in England, Italy, Germany, Finland and Spain.

She settled in Ventura County after marrying Ventura attorney Kirk Grossman. In 1990, she began teaching bilingual education at Will Rogers after earning her credentials at the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge.

Grossman’s students, who call her “Mrs. G”, said the best thing about her is that she’s nice to all of them and doesn’t yell.

“If you mess up, she doesn’t get all mad,” Casey Jones, 10, said. “She just says, ‘I’ll help you later.’ She makes learning fun.”

Grossman said she was surprised by the students’ comments. “I’m probably meaner than they think I am.”

But she said she nurtures an atmosphere of mutual respect in her classroom.

“If a child comes to a classroom and they don’t have the sense that they’re valued, that the teacher likes them, they’re not going to learn,” she said. “They’re not going to be as influenced by the teacher.”

As a first-generation Chinese-American, Grossman said she was naturally drawn to bilingual education. She learned English in first grade in Texas where there was no bilingual program.

“It was pretty traumatic,” she said. And she wants to make the experience of learning a second language better for all her students: both the Anglos trying to learn Spanish and the Spanish-speakers who need to master English.

Besides English and Chinese, Grossman speaks Italian, French and Spanish.

“They look at me and know they can do it too,” she said.