As a prominent member on campus who’s worked in the district for 15 years, Angie Yi, teacher of both English American Voices and Literature and the Environment has been awarded Teacher of the Year by the school district team.

Yi’s courses are taught through different perspectives, whether that be an environmental, racial, cultural or historical lens. Caroline Grace, an 11th grade student enrolled in Literature and the Environment, is impressed with her winning teacher of the year and also finds the award quite fitting for her character. 

“I love how she gets data and she’s putting it into making class better and into making kids want to do better,” Grace said. “If 80% of my class needs to work on reasoning, she has put together the most in depth way to get your writing level to an 11th grade level and higher and she’s getting us so ready for college [by doing so].”

According to Yi, with the help of fellow teachers she was able to map out the curriculum for the newly added courses and begin teaching students.

“For Literature and the Environment, I created that with Ms. Valentekovich, who teaches AP Lang. She was such an important part of creating this curriculum and I was so thankful and happy to work on that with her,” Yi said. “And then for American Voices, I worked with Ms. Molina as well as Ms. Kipp[…]it was an extremely collaborative process.”

To curate the perfect curriculum for her students, Yi has put a lot of thought into the meaning and importance of the books she decides to teach in both of her classes.

“American Voices is an ethnic course, and what that means is that we really want to give space for voices that have traditionally been on the margins of our educational systems,” Yi said. “One of my favorite books to teach [in] my ethnic studies course is ‘There There’ because the indigenous voice has been invisible for so long, and we want to bring that to the forefront of our learning experience in terms of why their history has been silenced. I think it’s good to question that.”

Not only does the course itself have to be clear enough for others to understand and learn from, but the teacher responsible for introducing the subject also plays a huge role for students to take in all of this new information.

“Her attitude towards learning really shapes the classroom in a way I’ve never really been around before,” Grace said. “She is so in tune and adapted to everybody’s perspective in the classroom … and it’s like her own little community in the classroom and she [really] nurtures it.”

One of Ms Yi’s many inspirations behind her teaching career was her trig pre-calc teacher in High School.

“He just had a way of explaining it where it made sense. I never heard him raise his voice, he just had the class spellbound by the way that he taught math. And I remember, I wanted my students to feel that way in my class,” Yi said. “I wanted them to feel more confident in their writing, the way he made me feel more confident in my math skills, [and] I wanted my students to feel like they were part of something cool.”

According to Grace, Yi’s kind character shapes the classroom in a way that benefits her students, and she makes it a goal of hers to help accommodate her students and hear from everybody’s perspective.

“She wants everybody to succeed and be a better writer, and those are the qualities that make teachers so good,” Grace said. “So you know when you step into that classroom, you are going to come out better than you first stepped in.”

With all the work Yi has put in this year, from creating two new curriculums alongside others to taking in data from student surveys to understand how she can better help her students, she’s certainly done her part as a well-known teacher amongst students and faculty.

“One of the things I want [students] to take away [from my class] is that their words matter and they should be unapologetically taking up space. I want them to have confidence in the words that they use, and I want them to use it for good,” Yi said. “That’s why I love teaching English because you learn all the different ways that we use language. I want my students to use language confidently, appropriately, joyfully, inspiringly, and know that they actually do have the power and the knowledge to do what is right in this world.”