Chalkboard champion Paul Howard, a middle school social studies teacher from Washington, DC, was selected the 2018 District of Columbia Teacher of the Year

Chalkboard champion Paul Howard, a middle school social studies teacher from Washington, DC, was selected the 2018 District of Columbia Teacher of the Year. Paul teaches 7th and 8th grade at LaSalle-Backus Education Campus. His career as an educator has spanned six years.

LaSalle-Backus, part of the Washington DC Public School system, describes itself as a diverse community school united to inspire global thinkers, creators, and world leaders by honoring and developing the whole student.

Paul brings a unique, and pragmatic, perspective to his career as an educator. “It is impossible for a teacher to satisfy all the needs of all their students. No one person can pass on enough wisdom, knowledge, and love to children to prevent all of them from suffering,” Paul asserts. “While most people understand this conceptually at a societal level, teachers experience this first hand. At some point you will fail as a teacher, and that failure will impact a child. Your failures will have names and faces attached to them,” he continues. “A teacher is not the sole reason for a student’s success, nor is a teacher the sole reason for their failure; however, young teachers should know that they will experience both and they both shape you as an educator,” he concludes.

Portland’s Matthew Bacon-Brenes recognized as Oregon’s 2018 Teacher of the Year.

The 2018 Oregon State Teacher of the Year is Matthew Bacon-Brenes, a middle school social studies teacher from Portland.

Matthew, a California native, spent his childhood in Oregon’s Lake Oswego. After his graduation from Whitman College, he inaugurated his career as an educator teaching English in Japan through an exchange program. After three years there, he returned  to Oregon to teach at Gladstone High School for ten years and then fifteen years Mt. Tabor Middle School. In all, his career as a professional educator has spanned 29 years.

Matthew is credited as instrumental to the success of Portland’s popular Japanese immersion program. He supervises an annual two-week-long trip for eighth-graders that allows students to study Japanese culture and history. The course concludes with a culminating project that is influenced by their findings. He has run the program for 20 years.

In addition to his 2018 honor, Matthew has also been awarded a Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence for 2019 from the National Education Association (NEA)  Foundation and Horace Mann.

The award is one of five given nationally, and comes with a $10,000 prize. The five winners are also finalists for the NEA Member Benefits Award, one of whom will garner a $25,000 prize in February at a gala to be held in Washington, DC.