Golden Apple Awards for Excellence in Teaching
Southland high school teachers among 32 finalists for state awards
Seven of the 32 Illinois high school finalists for Golden Apple Awards for Excellence in Teaching work at schools in the south suburbs and on the South Side.
For the first time this year, eligibility boundaries for the nonprofit’s recognition of exemplary educators were expanded to include all of Illinois.
The finalists represent just 6 percent of more than 550 nominations.
All finalists, who were nominated by fellow educators, students, parents or community members, will be honored Feb. 23 at the Golden Apple Celebration of Excellence at the Tinley Park Convention Center. Event details and tickets are available at
The 2019 Golden Apple Award recipients will be notified in the spring with surprise visits at their schools.
Here are the local finalists.
“I really do think that being a student of English is really being a student of life,” Mesterharm said.
“We learn a lot about being a human being just from being readers,” she said. “And when you learn how to write well, you learn how to make an argument — how to find your voice and make yourself heard.”
Mesterharm said she runs a “rigorous classroom” with a strong focus on teaching students how to be communicators.
A 2001 graduate of Marian, Mesterharm was seated in Advanced Placement composition class her junior year when she decided she was going to be a high school English teacher.
“I wanted to pass on my love of literature and the written word,” she said.
“When we read literature, whether poetry or prose, I teach my students that it’s art. We bring something of ourselves to it,” she said. “So we are actually meeting an author halfway whenever we read anything. We bring our own experiences to the work — and we walk away having learned something, having thought.”
Despite the challenges of teaching in a world distracted by technology, Mesterharm said “there are so many rewards for teaching.
“They say if you love what you do you never work a day in your life,” she said. “Everyday when I come into school, it’s certainly challenging, but I get so much out of it.
“The level of joy in my job is very high.”
For the past five years, Vazzana’s Change the World project has inspired his students to identify a problem in the school, the community, the state or the nation and attempt to do something about it.
The efforts have resulted in tangible change, such as new school water fountains that will be installed in the coming months and in introducing local middle school officials to Shepard’s Power PE program, which pairs typical kids with those who have special needs, fostering friendship and inclusion.
“These kids are using rhetorical skills to convince someone to act,” he said. “There’s a tangibleness to this kind of project that makes kids want to work harder.”
Vazzana says, “I’m not a traditional English teacher who reads a book in sections and then talks about vocabulary.
“Relevancy and truth matter to me,” he said.
Raised in a family of educators, Vazzana said he knew his senior year of high school that he wanted to be a teacher.
“I’m very lucky to have been mentored by some wonderful people in my life,” he said. “I like to use what I have learned to make my teaching as strong as possible.”
“I lean very heavily on the constructivism theory — the idea that students construct their own knowledge,” Hurley said. “My students have their own learning experiences. They take charge of it. They drive it.”
Hurley said he works hard outside of school hours to create events, research prompts and activities that students will find engaging.
“In my classroom, I am not standing in front of the room talking. Kids are moving around, asking each other questions,” he said.
“I think that’s the future of teaching. Because we don’t really know what these kids are going to be doing in 2030 or 2040,” he said.
The best way to help them, Hurley said, is to teach them how to question, how to research, how to problem solve.
“Students have to try, fail, get picked back up and try again. We do that as adults now in our jobs,” he said. “Everyone retains things better when they apply concepts themselves.”
Teaching is Hurley’s third career.
“Unless I count the Chicago Transit Authority, then it’s my fourth,” he said.
“I’ve done a lot of different things,” he said. “I have a story about physics from every line of work.”
Teaching, he said, is about reaching every kid where they’re at and elevating them.
“In one of my classes, I have the No. 1 senior at Reavis and I have the No. 392 student — in the same classroom,” he said. I know I’m not going to keep them all engaged. But what I can do it get one-half of the room started. Let some explore on their own. Give them all something to master.”
A former Boy Scout who achieved Eagle Scout rank, Hurley is a U.S. Army veteran who served during Iraqi Freedom. He also worked for several years for the Boeing Company on the West Coast.
It was his mom’s best friend who convinced him to leave the “lifeless, soulless” corporate world, where stress and the pursuit of money ruled the day.
“I realized my entire life, from 10 years old on, I was engaged in things that served others. That’s what made me happiest,” he said. So, 12 years ago, he became a teacher.
“Every year I work hard to be better,” he said.
“I believe I can teach anybody to cook,” said Travis, who teaches at Southside Occupational Academy, which services a special needs population.
Travis is a firm believer in overcoming obstacles, of not letting them derail you or make you dependent on someone else.
“I introduce new things and try new things all the time,” she said.
Her students chop, grill, fry, even bake.
“They do everything you’d do in a regular chef class,” she said. “And that’s how I want it to be.”
If a student has a physical disability that prevents him from completing a task in a typical way, she goes in search of a new way for him to meet the goal.
“We adapt,” she said.
The students make international cuisines and serve meals to the entire school twice a year.
“Last year we did Egypt. We made all this Egyptian cuisine,” she said. “We had to search around the city for ingredients.
“It is so much fun,” she said. “I think I have a gift of being able to help others do things their own way.”
She can easily relate to kids with special needs because she remembers what it was like to grow up with dyslexia.
“I had my own struggles,” she said. “But that helped me understand that there are different ways to learn.
“For a lot of these kids, people have always done everything for them. I try my best not to do things for them. I want them to learn how to do things on their own,” she said.
“I want them to embrace the skills they have.”
“I ask my students, ‘If I dropped you off in Germany tomorrow, what could you do, how well could you express yourself?’”
Foreign language education today is much more communicative, Raatjes said.
“When I was a student it was based on verb charts and grammar and structures. Today it’s much more about applicable communication,” he said. “That doesn’t mean structures and grammar never get touched on. They’re integrated into the context of communication.”
Raatjes said he gauges what his students are interested in and then incorporates those topics into his lesson plans.
“I try to keep things as student-centered as much as possible,” he said.
Raatjes started at Lincoln-Way teaching both German and art but very quickly moved to just German because demand for the classes was high.
“German has always been quite popular at Lincoln-Way,” he said. “That can be attributed to the wonderful teachers we have and a lot of the community having German ethnicity. Kids are interested in the language of their grandparents and great-grandparents.”
He said all languages are important.
“I think being bilingual or trilingual in today’s day and age where we’re becoming such a globalized community is important,” he said. “It’s a completely different kind of learning. Language challenges your brain in different ways.”
Raatjes said he knew “in my freshman year art class with Paul McDermott, who is now a superintendent in an elementary district, that I wanted to be a teacher. He was incredibly inspiring for me.
“I enjoy learning, and I think people who enjoy learning are attracted to teaching,” he said. “They like sharing that passion with other people.”
Ross-Cook calls what she does “break-teaching 101.”
“I am probably one of the most energetic people I know,” she said. “If I’m teaching prepositions I may jump up on a desk, or get under it. I love visual imagery.”
She also loves making things “real” for her students.
“You may not want to talk about Hamlet, but I’m going to talk with you about a man who is dealing with whether he should live or die, a man who’s upset he lost his father,” she said.
“A high school teacher has to find a way to communicate that while I may not come from your world, I have walked in similar pain and similar joy,” Ross-Cook said.
“This age group is so looking for someone to remember what it was like to be them, and not in an artificial way,” she said.
So she tells her students, “I so understand what it means to struggle with self-esteem, or when you’re afraid to talk about your depression, or when you’ve had your heart broken.”
Ross-Cook was inspired to go into education by teacher Candy Dinwiddie at Rich Central High School.
“She was that person who made you meet her standards, who believed 100 percent that you could meet her standards,” she said. “And you did.”
After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and working in several different positions at H-F, Ross-Cook went back to school to get certified. She has been teaching for nine years.
“Because we teach special needs students, I teach real-world experiences,” Young said.
“Many times people look at students with special needs and see their disability. We teach them by focusing on their abilities. We strengthen the areas that they’re weak in and give them opportunities for real-world practices,” she said.
Among the life and vocational skills Young helps students acquire are how to interview, how to dress for the weather, how to make change and how to communicate effectively.
“Everything we take for granted in the real world,” she said.
Special education teachers, she said, “need to be able to do it all.”
Every day, Young said, she takes her students on public transportation to work sites, including Mount Sinai and Holy Cross hospitals, where they learn how to do jobs in food service, transport, environmental services and the mail room.
“Our school day doesn’t look like a typical school day — or typical teacher day,” she said.
Young was a law student at Chicago State University when she dropped out and took a full-time position as an assistant manager at a shoe store.
Just before her daughter turned 1, she lost her job and turned to her faith for guidance.
“The Lord brought back to my recollection a previous job at a school, when I had enjoyed helping the ones who had the hardest time,” she said. “Because of that, I went into special education.”
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