Second science teacher to receive award

Two years. Two awards. $20,000.

Last year, science teacher Marcus Sherman took home the Cortopassi Family Foundation Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching Awards, which recognizes two “outstanding” science and math teachers in the county.

And with the award money that Sherman received last year, he purchased classroom response systems, commonly referred to as clickers, for the science classes that allow the teacher to quiz the whole class while having the answers on screen after every question.

This year science teacher Elizabeth Lewis won the $10,000, and with it she plans to buy another set of the clickers.

“There’s this unspoken rule that the same school can’t win twice in a row and I’m glad the committee overruled it,” Assistant Principal Youlin Aissa said.

She is rather fond of Lewis, claiming that she deserved the recognition, because of all of the hard work she puts into making this campus great.

Lewis has worked on many activities and programs on campus and she has strained over “behind the scene” work for years. She says that now she is glad that she was recognized for her hard work.

One of her many accomplishments on campus is creating lesson plans for substitutes that have taken over for one of her department colleagues, spending her time working on them whenever she can. And as most people know, she is constantly busy working on other activities and her own class’ lessons as well.

The money that she will receive is split in half, giving $5,000 to the science department and another $5,000 for her personal needs.

“I was incredibly excited because we can get cool new supplies for the department,” she said.

And with Lewis’s share of the award money, she plans to spend it on bills and a trip to Disneyland.

Taylor Garcia, a junior, knows that the money will be put to good use and said that Lewis knows what the students need and what they will benefit from. She is very fond of Lewis’s teaching style.

“She’s a good teacher because she cares a lot about her students and she makes sure they get the best opportunities they can,” she said.

And aside from being a caring teacher and an influence in students’ lives, Lewis has volunteered her time to partake in various activities around campus.

“My students typically don’t know all of the stuff I’m involved in,” she said.

Aissa thinks that she is very humble and that she has dedicated herself to making the school and her colleagues improve.

“She’s a very deserving candidate,” she said.

In Lewis’s mind, having two teachers win back-to-back really makes a strong statement on the campus as a whole. The whole science department has been working on ways to improve, and she thinks that with the winning of the award, it says that what they are doing is working.

“It shows that we have a strong instructional environment,” she said.