Apples for Teachers : The County’s 5 Best Will Be Recognized for Their Accomplishments in theClassroom and Those After the Day’s Last Bell

Social science teacher Renae Boyum just treated herself to a brand-new car. It’s a 1995 Camaro, hunter green with T-tops. Leather seats, compact-disc player, the works. Power everything.

Boyum, who works at Garden Grove High, didn’t get lucky on a TV game show, or enter the lottery. She is one of Orange County’s five Teachers of the Year.

“The money’s already spent,” the 47-year-old educator said sheepishly of the $15,000 check she will receive this morning at an awards breakfast. “When I heard I was going to win the money, I thought I could do something practical, put it away for my kids’ college. Then I thought, ‘No, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.’

“Every time I drive it,” she said, “I can think of the honor.”

Boyum and the four other outstanding teachers will be feted today by more than 300 educators at a breakfast at the Red Lion Hotel in Costa Mesa. The five will be eligible for California’s Teacher of the Year Award, scheduled to be announced next month. Each state’s winner will be entered in a national contest sponsored by Good Housekeeping magazine.

Applicants must write autobiographies and essays explaining their educational philosophies. Many are nominated by their individual districts, where they have already won accolades and often perform extra duties, such as grant-writing, training colleagues or developing innovative curricula.

For Lois Knudson, becoming a teacher “was as natural as breathing.”

In school, Knudson recalled, she “was the kid who was never absent because I thought I’d miss something.” As a teen, she volunteered at a school for the emotionally disturbed. For the past 15 years--a dozen of them in the Irvine Unified School District--she has been working full time with special-needs students.

Knudson, 36, said she makes her lessons exciting by bringing in speakers and taking students on field trips: weekly shopping expeditions that allow them to practice math and use public transportation. Other visits include the post office, police station and museums.

“I laugh all day. You have to,” said the Dana Point resident, a special education teacher at Lakeside Middle School. “I’m always tired, but I have a lot of energy during the day. When (disabled students) have a small gain, and it’s something that someone said, ‘I don’t think they’re ever going to get it,’ it makes it all worthwhile. It doesn’t matter that you’re tired.”

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Ron Archer, an English teacher at Trabuco Hills High in Mission Viejo, said his background as a broadcast journalism student helps him communicate in the classroom. But he said the key to effective teaching is making students take responsibility for their own educations.

“I cannot learn for them,” said Archer, 40, who has 18 years of teaching behind him. “I can teach. But only they can do the work, only they can get the grade. I can’t teach and learn.”

Archer said he also tries to emphasize context for his lessons: showing students not just what they need to know, but why.

“Learning how to spell tomato is not the key,” he said, “as much as it is learning how to memorize.”

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In Irini Rickerson’s classroom at Orange Coast College, context is key.

A native of Athens, Greece, Rickerson teaches the history of art, architecture and furniture. Along with paintings, sculpture and artifacts, though, she introduces the psychology and anthropology of each period.

To make lessons relevant, Rickerson tries to get students involved in the community. Recently, she and her class helped design a building for a new homeless shelter in Laguna Beach.

But for Rickerson, the real rewards come through personal contact with individuals.

“Sometimes I have students that have a major problem. It doesn’t have anything to do with art history. So many people, they never have a chance to have someone there to listen. By listening to them you can really change things around,” she said. “When I lecture, they can see that I never judge. They feel very safe to come to talk to me.”

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Like all of this year’s winners, Marilyne Coats emphasized the importance of diversifying lessons to appeal to different types of youngsters. In her language arts classroom at Willis Warner Middle School in Westminster, the 50-year-old veteran educator uses drama, music and art to help students understand literature and encourage their writing.

Students with limited English proficiency or children who are particularly shy often surprise her with their abilities through untraditional forms of expression, Coats said.

“Students will work toward our expectation,” she said. “When we expect high, they will reach for it. When you see them reaching, it’s exhilarating.”

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Boyum, who has been teaching for nearly two decades, said she joined the profession because she saw the powers teachers have.

It started in sixth grade, when an instructor embarrassed her in front of the whole class by asking her to mouth the words instead of singing with the chorus because her voice was off key. In high school, two teachers showed a positive side of this power by instilling a love of history and political science in Boyum.

“We impact kids’ lives . . . in ways that sometimes we’re not even aware of,” she said. “Sometimes kids go off to college and come back and thank us, and I’ve had many who’ve said they became teachers because I inspired them,” she said.

“But we also impact them in many smaller ways: by being kind to them, by noticing that they’re there, by noticing that they’re not there.”