New teachers talk about their careers, upcoming school year

By Anthony Ramirez

Sunday, Aug. 22, 2010 | 2 a.m.

For much of the past two decades, the story has been the same. The Clark County School District needed battalions of teachers for a student body that has tripled to more than 300,000 today.

Now, as enrollment levels off, the district needs only platoons, with 400 or so teachers hired this year, down from 2,300 only three years ago.

Controversy hasn’t slowed, though. The state Legislature has made some of the harshest cuts in the nation in the district’s budget, with more expected next year.

The district scores near the bottom in graduation rates nationally and, in the view of some critics, public respect.

In remarks that have been compressed and edited, new teachers talk about themselves and what they’ll do in the upcoming school year.

Richard Imon, 46

I’ve been a teacher for 22 years and a substitute teacher in Clark County for almost 10. I’ll be a special-education teacher at Mojave High School in North Las Vegas, teaching world history for grades 9-12. We’re here to help everyone. I had a learning disability: I transposed numbers in math problems. My most memorable teacher wasn’t even a teacher. He was the librarian at California High School in Whittier. His name was Denton Porter. He realized I had a learning disability. I was in the library every day studying. Mr. Porter said if you try, you can succeed, and he helped me in choosing classes so I could raise my grade-point average and get into Cal State Fullerton, where I got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I’m a teacher today because of him.

Rhiannon Gollhofer, 30

My family has been in Las Vegas for 80 years. I worked in Iowa as a lobbyist for programs for abused children, so I thought I could become a government teacher. But social studies is a difficult area to get into as a new teacher. I’m a substitute teacher. One day, I got a call from the people at the school I had graduated from, Basic High, and they said, “I know this is going to sound odd, but we need a long-term guest teacher in dance.” I said, OK, I’ll give it a shot. And I absolutely fell in love with it. So now I’m going to teach dance at Liberty High in Henderson. As a substitute, I had my first day of school last year. It is organized chaos. But I love the first day.

John Tyler, 38

I’m a native, and my father has a Ph.D. in education. I knew even as a kid that education is what I wanted to do. For the last four years I was a fitness trainer for the Navy, and this year I’m going to be a first-time teacher and a special-education teacher in the Clark County schools. I love Vegas. With the School District being the fifth largest, I couldn’t imagine going anywhere else. The first day will be a challenge but I’m confident. I’ll probably feel more confident in a year.

Joseph Lin, 29

I’m from New Brighton, Minn., a suburb of the Twin Cities. I’m going to teach math at Rancho High School, but I don’t know which grade yet. Everybody hates math. I agree with that. I know that I’m the anomaly. I love math. I went to Berkeley and MIT. I was a chemical engineer here in Las Vegas for six years. I love showing how we use math every single day. I’ve designed buildings, where every day it’s throwing out different kinds of equations. You learn in class that it’s the line of a slope, and a kid will say, ‘what does that have to do with real life?’ Oh, it has everything to do with real life. This handrail right here. That’s a slope. You’ve got to know how to build it. That’s real life.

Dwain Coleman, 26

I was born and raised in Las Vegas. I went to Rancho High School. I’ve been a substitute teacher for the last three years, for whenever a school needs a sub for the day. Kids test their substitute teacher. The big thing is to establish the rules: I’ll give you a warning, and after that warning, I’ll write your name down for the teacher to take care of you when he gets back. And if I have any other problems with you, I’ll send you to the dean’s office. The budget cuts were something definitely on my mind. But I grew up in Clark County, and there are good teachers and there are teachers who aren’t so good. I think the good teachers can make all the difference in how we’re perceived as a school district.

Jamie Jones, 34

I grew up in the small town of Rialto in California. But I’ve been in Vegas almost 10 years now. For the last few years, I’ve been a substitute teacher, and I taught sixth-grade science last year. My most memorable teacher was Sandra J. Keller, who also taught the sixth grade, at W.J.C. Trapp Elementary School in Rialto. I had never seen anybody like that before in my life. She was this bleached-blonde whirlwind, supertanned, and dressed like a rainbow. She made learning very, very fun. Sixth grade is not going to be a challenge for me. I already know how their little emotions are. They’re so cute. They think they’re so grown-up. But they’re still kind of babies so they still respect the teacher as the ultimate authority.