Future teachers get early start
By Rod Ohira
Advertiser Central O'ahu Writer
Seventeen-year-old Anna Kaneshiro carries a full load of math classes on Thursdays at Kapolei High School — not as a student, but as a teacher.
Photos by Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser
The unique experience is priceless, said the senior, who plans to attend the University of Hawai'i-Manoa and become a teacher.
Senior Anna Kaneshiro, above left, teaches an algebra class at Kapolei High School, while her teacher and mentor, Rebecca Lowe, listens in.
Kaneshiro, a National Honor Society member whose parents are also teachers, prepares lesson plans and does assessments and grading for the four classes she teaches under the guidance of math instructor Rebecca Lowe.
"All of it is real," Lowe said.
"I was in my last year of college when I student-taught, and you don't really know if teaching is right for you until then. It's such a benefit for Anna to already be doing stand-up in a classroom."
Her parents, Hawai'i Baptist Academy art teacher Mark Kaneshiro, and his wife, Kathryn, a first-grade teacher at Kalei'opu'u Elementary in Waipahu, have advised their daughter of the pay scale and long hours involved.
But Anna said, "I see the enjoyment they get out of teaching and the difference they make in people's lives. My dad has been teaching for 30 years, and kids remember him. They teach for the love of it, and that's what I want to do."
Kaneshiro is one of six Kapolei High seniors in the Hawai'i Alliance for Future Teachers' "Explorations in Education" program.
The goal of the program is to attract high school students to teaching careers in Hawai'i schools by providing juniors and seniors with a career pathway curriculum that introduces them to teaching strategies, organizational and management skills and salaries and benefits information.
In addition to Kapolei High, five other O'ahu schools — Campbell, Farrington, Kaimuki, Kahuku and Kamehameha — have implemented the "Explorations in Education" course into their curriculum. More than half of the 110 students in the program attend Kamehameha, said Hawai'i Alliance for Future Teachers President Linda Shimamoto.
Kapolei's curriculum structure, in which seniors and juniors are placed in career-interest academies of their choosing, is a natural complement to the "Explorations in Education" program.
There are 965 students in Kapolei's seven academies — business, industrial technology, professional science, learning center of applied technology, human services, graphics, and fine arts — where mandatory core courses of English and social studies are taught in a manner that relates to their career interest. Human services and graphics are the largest academies, with 180 students each.
Kapolei High School senior Anna Kaneshiro finds time for some individual help to one of the students in an algebra class. Her mentor, Rebecca Lowe, says Kaneshiro has the respect of her fellow students because she is knowledgeable in the subject.
Ninth- and 10th-graders at Kapolei, which has a total enrollment of 2,200, are assigned to teams rather than academies.
Trisha Tokuhara, Megan Gomes, Erika Edelman, Howard Vinhasa and Dayna Durbin are other Kapolei seniors in the "Explorations in Education" program. All except Durbin, a fine-arts academy student, are in the human-services academy.
"It's a perfect complement to the Explorations program because the kids learn how to deal with people and then they're exposed to the actual job market," said Kapolei principal Alvin Nagasako, who noted that he knows of no other public high school in the state employing an academy setup covering all juniors and seniors.
Being in the human-services academy has helped Kaneshiro in her approach to teaching math.
"I think of math as a different language, one in which one plus one equals two and nothing really changes," she said. "In history and English, things are always changing, and it can be tedious to remember how it connects."
Said her mentor Lowe: "Anna is going to be a good teacher. She's doing great, and the kids receive her well because they know she's knowledgeable in the subject. You can see they respect her by the questions they ask. She's creative in her lesson plans. She did one on functions by creating a Valentine's Day game. The important thing is the kids remembered it."
Trisha Tokuhara, who wants to be an elementary school teacher, chose the human-services academy in order to do an internship.
"It's the only one that allows you to go out in the field," said Tokuhara, who has been observing and assisting at Makakilo Elementary School on Thursdays.
The human-services academy shows connections between past and present, she said, so "you can see how some things change, although I think not as much as people might believe.
"I can see it in today's reading and math programs," she said. "They don't just read out loud like when I went to elementary school. They have to write sentences, understand what they read and learn to pronounce words."
In the human-services academy, English teacher Joan Lewis recently introduced her students to Charles Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities" by having them read a brief biography of the author and discussing why the underlying theme in many of his works dealt with "haves and have nots." The approach in other academies, of course, would be different.
"What is our attitude about people who can't pay bills?" Lewis asked her class, spurring a discussion on social issues such as poverty, isolation, economics, personal responsibilities and the penal system.
"They're not just learning literature for nothing," Lewis said. "We want them to apply to something current."
Reach Rod Ohira at 535-8181 or rohira@honoluluadvertiser.com
