For Educator of the Year, I nominate Mrs. Rosaio my 8th grade science teacher from Skyline Middle School. I nominated Mrs. Rosaio because she was one of the few teachers that I remember that had faith in any student. She would always make sure we got our work done, but she also remembered that we were kids and having fun would make the learning process easier. Mrs. Rosaio would put in the extra work for the kids with the lower grades, and she always believed they had the potential to put more effort into their work. Some teachers would do anything to get rid of the kids that always had an attitude or didn’t feel their school work was important.

During science class when we would do experiments, Mrs. Rosaio would pair up kids for group projects and science labs. She would make sure that the groups that she created would be a mix of people that would like to do their work, and students that did not. She would explain to the people that would complain about their group and say that she wanted those kids to be able to be influenced to want to do their work. She would pair students just to try and get the students who didn’t want to do any of their work motivated by their partners to complete most of their work. I remember a brief conversation that Mrs. Rosaio and I had. I explained to her that the some of the students wouldn’t do work anyway even if we had tried to motivate them. She just told me that they are all smart and capable of doing their own school work.

Mrs. Rosaio also understood that she was teaching kids in middle school. She would find ways to make doing work fun and bearable for the kids that absolutely didn’t like to do work. She would take an experiment that would be taken more seriously in high school, and change the experiment around just so it would be more fun. Mrs. Rosaio would cooperate with the students; she would never raise her voice, or send them out of class unless it was really needed. She would handle the students in her best way possible while staying calm in every situation. The students in the school thought that being disrespectful with the teachers would solve their problems and get them what they wanted. Even most teachers would lose their patience with a student quickly just to get them out of their hair, but even Mrs. Rosaio knew that losing her patience would solve nothing, in fact, it would make the situations worse.

I clearly recall how she would put additional effort into those kids that needed help with school but didn’t want to admit it. She uncovered that a lot of those kids that needed “help” on their school work enjoyed being able to do it with her help. The students would start to warm up to her and accept the fact that she truly wanted to help with their school work, no matter how much they acted like they didn’t want anything to do with school. No matter what she would make sure the whole class was involved during class and experiments. She would always be happy to include students in her presentations and examples.

Students at my school would always tell me how much they loved her as a teacher and how nice she was to all her students no matter how intolerable their personality was. I walked into that classroom just expecting a lady that was nice to everyone and was always happy about 98 percent of the time. As the year passed, I started to realize that she was a much better teacher than what people explained her to be. When I started to notice how she taught her classes, that’s when I realized, she was one of the best teachers I have ever had in all my school years. For these reasons and more I’m nominating her for Teen Ink’s Educator of the Year award.