Creativity, dedication, intelligence, discipline, and love. Each of these qualities is embodied in the Snoqualmie Valley Schools Foundation’s 2012 selections for Educators of the Year, to be honored Thursday, March 22, at the foundation’s annual luncheon.

Tina Longwell, the secretary/registrar at Opstad Elementary School feels lucky to come to school, where she says the children teach her something new every day. For the 2012 Classified Employee of the Year, the best part of her job is everything, even the challenge of not laughing at some of the things her 540 kids say.

Elizabeth Cronin, Elementary Educator of the Year, makes sure to connect with her fourth graders at Cascade View Elementary School every day, with a hug, a secret handshake, or just a high-five. She especially loves teaching math, because she can see her students learning. “It’s one of the best things about teaching,” she said. Another is when students are so excited about a subject, they research it on their own, and then tell her all about it the next morning.

Dave Bettine watches over his eighth grade students as they explore and test boundaries at Twin Falls Middle School. His job, he says, is not only to teach them math and all its practical applications, but also to provide a safety net for each of them in their last year of middle school.  He’s also going to help them launch a weather balloon into space, just for fun. He is the Middle School Educator of the Year.

For High School Educator of the Year Jenny Foster, her Spanish classes are as much about teaching language and culture as they are about building relationships. In her junior year of high school, spent as an exchange student at a Columbian all-girls Catholic school, Foster found a caring, loving culture, and a greater understanding of her role as a citizen of the world. Her mission in teaching, she says, is to impart this to her students.

Perfect textbook

In 22 years of teaching and continuous learning, Spanish teacher Foster has yet to find “the perfect textbook.”

So now, with children in tenth, seventh and fourth grades respectively and a husband who also has a demanding education job, she has started to think about the “someday” when she might be able to write it herself.

It would have a technology piece, to engage students, she said, with history and pop culture references for “the authentic cultural piece,” and it will somehow fully immerse students in the language, written and spoken.

She jokes that the book will be “a compilation of 22 years,” but it’s more likely to be a recreation of Foster’s junior year of high school, the year she spent as an exchange student in Columbia.

“That was one of the best years of my entire life, because it really solidified what I wanted to teach,” Foster said.

Foster grew up on a farm in Corvallis, Ore., and knew since the fourth grade that she was going to be a teacher, “I just didn’t know of what,” she said

She remembers often recruiting her three younger siblings as students. “I always had them at the kitchen table , and I made up these worksheets for them, and I’d say ‘ok,you’re not getting up from the table until you finish these.’”

Winning a Rotary scholarship for a year in Columbia gave her the direction she needed, she said. Initially, she thought she’d request a Scandinavian country to spend her year abroad, but then she went to a Rotary conference to meet people from the other host countries.

“I met the Columbians, the Brasileños – (Brazilians), the Chileans, and I fell in love completely with the Latino culture and these people,” she said. “They were warm and friendly … and I thought, if that was what my year would be like with these kinds of people, I would be really happy. So Columbia was my first choice.”

As a junior, she was enrolled in an all-girls Catholic school in Columbia. She’d taken two years of high school French, but knew no Spanish when she arrived, so she spent the first half of the year learning Spanish and grammar with a second-grade class. By her second semester, however, she was taking trigonometry, chemistry and philosophy, entirely in Spanish.

“I knew by the third or fourth month, that I was going to be OK, because I woke up in November, thinking, ‘oh, my gosh, I dreamt in Spanish!’” she recalled.

Her own immersion in the language was an invaluable experience, and one she tries to recreate for her second- and third-year students at Mount Si High School, at least during her class time.

“They sign a pledge of honor that they won’t speak English,” she said, and they pretty much hold to it, except for one day a week ago, when a girl simply had to tell Foster in English, how cute her shoes were – she didn’t know the correct expression in Spanish.

She’ll know how to say it by now, though, because Foster places a special emphasis on the spoken word in her classes.

“I’m all about the oral piece,” Foster said. “It’s great to know how to read and write… but if you can’t articulate your ideas orally, why learn a language?”

Her fluency in speaking Spanish, though, is only a small part of what Foster learned in Columbia. She also absorbed the culture, saying “I haven’t found a more generous loving warm people in a culture,” and she saw how important relationships were, in everything people did.

That lesson, in particular, is reflected in her teaching now.

“These kids, 90 percent of what I teach, they aren’t going to remember, but they will always remember how I treated them, and what our relationship was,” she said. As an example, she points out two of her students in the lunchroom. “Those girls over there, they know I would do anything for them.”

Foster returned to Oregon from Columbia with greater confidence, “more of a vision of what it meant to be a world citizen,” and the momentum to reach her goal.

“I finished college in three and a half years, because I wanted to be in the classroom,” she said, adding “Trying to impart that, ‘what does it mean to be a world citizen’ to these kids, I think that was a huge part of my mission to be a teacher.”