Language No Barrier for Teacher

Santa Paula teacher Annette Halpern knew the shy ninth-grader in her English class spoke only Spanish. But she wasn’t going to let that stop him from reading. Last school year, she handed him a copy of the hugely popular Harry Potter book--translated into Spanish.

He gobbled it up, quickly moving on to Parts 2 and 3 in the series, and only pausing when he discovered Part 4 had not yet been translated. Determined, he grabbed a Spanish-English dictionary and plowed through that one too.

“What does that tell you?” said Halpern, 46. “This is the power and the wonder of books. And it makes me feel like I’m here for a reason.”

The 22-year veteran educator has made a career of helping immigrant students learn to speak, read and write in English.

Based largely on those efforts, local educators last week named Halpern Ventura County’s Teacher of the Year. She will now compete for the state title.

“It wasn’t until her class that I read a book cover to cover,” high school senior Carlos Reyes, a recent immigrant from Mexico, wrote in a letter to the Teacher of the Year selection committee.

Students such as Reyes say they have succeeded academically because Halpern expects them to.

She is known for combing over papers, often demanding rewrite after rewrite to whip a C paper into A shape. Students have come to appreciate the fact Halpern won’t accept less from them just because English is their second language.

In fact, she brags about the time she made all of her fledgling English speakers deliver the Gettysburg Address entirely in Spanish. Her point: Learning to master English isn’t an excuse to take a break from other areas of learning.

“You don’t have to patronize them by dumbing down anything,” Halpern said. “Kids are kids, with fertile minds, and they need a teacher with high standards. And some [students] don’t expect that.”

Halpern learned to appreciate education and hard work from her parents, who grew up in Massachusetts during the Great Depression. She was urged by her mother to enter a field where she would always find work. She encouraged Halpern to attend a vocational school and become a stenographer.

“But I was a studious, serious student,” Halpern said. “So that didn’t really jive.”

Fortunately, Halpern decided to take a lesson from her Harvard-educated father, who placed an emphasis on education and community service. Despite his Ivy League education, he chose to become a railroad switchman and represented his co-workers in their union.

‘I Knew I Wanted to Make a Difference’

“My father made a commitment to be with working people,” Halpern said. “I was raised in a household where we were taught to respect all kinds of people, regardless of race, religion, creed or economic status. Those were my molding experiences as a child. So no matter what my career was, I knew I wanted to make a difference.”

Halpern attended UCLA and graduated magna cum laude with a history degree. During college, she studied abroad in France and Mexico, becoming fluent in both French and Spanish. By 1985, she had earned a master’s degree in history from USC.

She began her career with the Los Angeles Unified School District, teaching history and English as a second language classes at Le Conte Junior High and Belmont High School. She moved on to John Marshall High School in 1987.

It was during her years in Los Angeles that Halpern’s views on bilingual teaching evolved. Many of her students were struggling to learn English, making it difficult to master the required reading for history class. So she lobbied for Spanish versions of history books.

Halpern, however, left the district in 1995. Her then 3-year-old daughter was struggling with asthma and needed to escape the smoggy air of Los Angeles. She took a job teaching English and English as a second language at Santa Paula High School.

Halpern brought her same approach to teaching immigrant students in Santa Paula, who had striking similarities to her students in Los Angeles.

“Many of these students come from poor, rural areas and they’ve never read a book in their life,” Halpern said.

“If a student can barely read his own language, how on earth can he be expected to jump into a regular English class?” she said. “We can’t ignore the literacy needs of our immigrant population.”

Today, thanks to Halpern’s work, the school library has a Spanish-language section, which contains the most checked-out books in the library, according to school officials.

Halpern also started a reading program that gives students extra credit points for every book they complete.

She is also the type of teacher, her colleagues say, who will spend her lunch hour eating with students, chatting about their lives and looking for moments to promote learning. All conversations are in English.

According to Basil Augustine, an English and drama teacher, “She’s the kind of teacher kids give their respect to because she’s earned it.”