Mrs. Curry (dark blue jacket) in action at last year's PK 50th Anniversary Party

eDragon News reporter Lilly Chang recently sat down with 5th grade teacher Dawn Curry.  Mrs. Curry recently won an award as Manhattan Beach's teacher of the year.  Congratulations to Mrs. Curry from everyone at Pennekamp!

Tell us about the Teacher of the Year Award

MBUSD nominates the teacher of the year on an annual basis.  They rotate it the nomination between elementary, middle school, and high school.  All the teachers are given consideration teaching at that grade level and the choice is made at the administrative or district level.  When they've made their selection, they call you up and give you the good news. I got the news last year in May.  It was perfect, it was like wow…thank you, thank you very much!  For K-5 they pick one teacher from all five school sites, so I felt very honored to be in that position.  I feel that I teach with a marvelous team of teachers, and I would hate to be in the role of having to pick (the winning teacher).  I think it would be a really hard job. 

When you win the Teacher of the Year Award for your district you then proceed to the county level.  To compete at the county level you have to write seven different essays on five different topics dealing with issues like what is your educational philosophy, what would a typical day in your classroom be like, some of those kinds of topics.  From the sixty-four districts of Los Angeles County, they pick twenty winners at that level, then they conduct one on one interviews with yourself and a panel, and from that twenty they narrow it down to fifteen county winners in Los Angeles County.  Winners will then compete against the other counties across California, and then that teacher becomes the state Teacher of the Year, there are three of them at that level.  Then they compete against all the other state Teachers of the Year, and then you have the National Teacher of the Year!  Pretty amazing, MBUSD actually has won one year at the National Teacher of the Year; it was Marilyn Whirry, she became the National Teacher of the Year!  (Marilyn Whirry was named National Teacher of the Year for her outstanding work as an Advanced Placement English Teacher at Mira Costa High School in 2000.)

I won for my district, but I’m done, thank you very much!  So you go to a luncheon, you get this wonderful certificate, and the PTA gave me a beautiful bouquet of flowers.  My colleagues here at Pennekamp gave me a gift certificate, and I feel very honored.  I had the opportunity to speak at the opening ceremonies at the first day of school here at Manhattan Beach to all the teachers.  I was the keynote speaker the first day of school.  And, so that’s what’s involved!  Three years ago, the last person to have won for at the elementary school level was Joanne Schepis, she teaches PEP at Pennekamp, so Pennekamp has won the last two Teacher of the Year awards at the elementary school level in MBUSD!

Tell us about your family

Conrad, my youngest son, is in his second year at a highly rated engineering program in Indiana.  He selected it because he wanted a small class size; he found the right fit, he loves it.  He’s doing quite well, he wants to study mechanical engineering.  He’s nineteen he’ll turn twenty next month.  My other son Eugene, he’s 24, he’s married, and they’re expecting their first child, so I should be a grandmother next month!  Eugene’s in Granada Hills, he’s a senior pastor out there, he got his first pastor job after finishing up at Golden State Seminary with his master’s degree.  He’s senior pastor at Baptist Church in Granada Hills and having a great time!  My husband is still alive and kicking, we’ve been married 30 years now, and in fact we’ll celebrate our 30^th wedding anniversary this next June!  We live in El Segundo, where I grew up in the same house.  We remodeled it, so it looks better.  My husband has a cat, I don’t claim the cat.  He feeds the cat, loves the cat,  and the cat sides with him.   

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I like to watercolor.  I take a watercolor class on Monday nights at the Jocelyn Center in El Segundo and I enjoy painting.  I like hiking on Saturdays, so I take a backpacker’s version of watercolors and go hiking on different trails in Santa Monica, find something really pretty and paint outdoors!

What were you like as a 5th Grader?

I hated school. As a fifth grader, I was an awful student.  I was one of those kinds of students that got into trouble every day because I just couldn’t sit still and school was boring.  Teachers just talked at you, and so my mischievous mind would find things to do which promptly got me into detention after school on a regular basis.  My mother had a 2 for 1 deal, you get in trouble at school you get into trouble when you got home!

How did you get into teaching as a career?

I went to college in Idaho and started studying pre med.  But then I got married halfway through college.  We came back to California and I went to X-ray school in Inglewood.  Then I did radiology for two years working as an x-ray tech.  We moved to Orange County and my husband and I and had our first child.  Motherhood was wonderful, but I needed some kind of intellectual stimulation, so I went back to school at U.C. Irvine.  I graduated with honors with social ecology, specializing in psychological and social problems.  So then I went on and worked as a pastoral counselor for twelve years and worked with all sorts of problems, from addictions to abuse to marital problems, all of it.  I had a good time, worked twelve years at that, after that we had another son, it was perfect I could work part-time; I could be home when my kids were home. 

Well, time marches on and my youngest was now in late grade school and I was looking for a challenge, as I tend to get bored easily, and I was looking for a challenge.  One of my friends was home schooling and they asked if I wouldn’t mind teaching an academy class for high schoolers, so I said I would.  I had twelve high school students.  I was teaching biology one year and chemistry the next year and physics the last year, so that was kind of fun. This is how I actually got my feet wet with teaching. 

Then one of my friends became principal of a Christian School and asked if I’d come down and work part-time for him.  I said I would, so I would do counseling in the morning and then teach in a private school in the afternoon.  I (then) had my chance to really work, it was Wilmington, so it was a very racially mixed community.  I got a really good chance to deal with different ethnicities of children and had a lot of fun, and learned about looking beyond my own ethnicity.  I did that for a year, in the process of doing that, my friend who was the principal of the school said, "Dawn, why don’t you go back and get your teaching credential, you’re a natural at this.”  My owns kids were up in late high school heading for college and the idea of making more money sounded appealing to me.  I was kind of growing tired of doing counseling, listening to people’s problems too much of my life, so I went back to school at the point.

I went to Chapman University and graduated top of the class in their teaching credential program and earned not only my teaching credential for primary but also my master’s degree in curriculum design and development. So I graduated with that and came back and did student teaching eight years ago here at Pennekamp in first grade.  I did one round of Pennekamp teaching first grade.  They said if you can teach first grade you can teach any grade and I had the opportunity to prove that they were right.  First grade is a definite challenge.  Then I went up and taught at the middle school, liked middle school kids a lot, finished my credential, finished my certificate and came back and worked as a reading specialist for the rest of the half of the year.  I worked with first, second, and third graders in teaching reading skills. 

Then a position opened at Pennekamp that year for a fourth grade teacher.  I applied, and I was accepted.  So I started off teaching my first year in fourth grade.  Then they downsized because they only needed three fourth grade teachers.  They were going to send me to second grade, and the week before school started, Dale (Keldrauk) called up and said, well we have a spot opening up in fifth do you want to go back up?  I said yes, took down my second grade room, that I had just decorated, ran up to fifth grade stapled up my room, not having any idea what social studies in fifth grade and rotations were going to be like!  That was six years ago.  So I’ve been teaching now fifth grade social studies for about six years.  I teach social studies to all three of the classrooms and now we’re teaching ROAR, which is a level reading group.  I take kids that have the most chance of success, that with a little bit of help their reading skills make dramatic jumps, so they have the most room for improvement.  I have about twenty-four kids in fifth grade that I work to death on reading and their comprehension, and we work overtime on them.  I love doing that!  I have my home room where I teach written language work to and I use the step-up to writing program, so I teach that and grammar to my home room, and then I teach social studies during rotations so it keeps me busy!