Team Members

High School

Magnolia High School teacher Robin Turner's new book, Greater Expectations (Stenhouse Publishers), comes out in April 2008. In it, Robin offers a combination of personal narrative, how-to lesson plans, and student samples which equip readers to challenge their underrepresented students to the greater expectations of the book's title. Learn more about the book, Greater Expectations.

Kelly Gallagher, teacher at Magnolia High School in the Anaheim Union High School District, has a newly published book, Teaching Adolescent Writers. Unlike his earlier books and videos which addressed reading, this book gives teachers strategies for motivating young writers and methods for guiding and building them. His publisher, Stenhouse, says about the book that unless we teach students "the necessary writing practice and skills needed to compete in a complex and fast-moving Information Age. . . they are in danger of being run over by a stampede-a literacy stampede."

Kelly's colleague and fellow Puente English teacher at Magnolia, Robin Turner, has completed a book which will also be published by Stenhouse. The book focuses on enabling underrepresented students to enroll and succeed in a four-year university. More about his book when it's released later this year.

Robert Penuela, teacher at Roosevelt High School in LAUSD, won a scholarship and gave out four. He and his wife held a silent auction of works donated by local Chicano artists and raised $2000 which they divided equally among four students, three of them Puente students. To pay for the food, drinks, and materials they bought for the auction, Robert donated the scholarship money he'd won. He and his wife plan to hold the auction again this year and hope to raise even more money for the Morales-Penuela Scholarship.

Krista Rogerson, Puente teacher at Tennyson High School in Hayward, was one of six recipients of the 2005 Carlston Family Foundation Outstanding Teachers of America Award. Chosen as teachers who have "worked tirelessly and creatively to give California's high school students the opportunity to achieve academically and, ultimately, professionally," honorees each receive $15,000, plus a $5,000 award for their school. The recipients are nominated by students, and Louis LaVenture, Hayward HS '99, said that Ms. Rogerson "...really opened my eyes to a world I never knew existed because all I ever saw was drugs, violence, and death." Louis graduated from CSU East Bay and is now a substitute English teacher. He adds, "I can honestly say Ms. Rogerson was one of my main inspirations to do so."

Community College

Teresa Guadiana, who co-founded Puente at College of the Sequoias and has remained the Puente counselor there since, received one of two Regina Stanback-Stroud Diversity Awards. The annual award, given by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, recognizes faculty members who have worked to promote the success of students from diverse backgrounds. The statewide organization represents thousands of community college faculty members.

This poem by Patrick L. Leong, Puente instructor at Diablo Valley College, was published in News from Native California, 18:2, winter 2004/05.

The Form

The question states:
check only ONE box.
Confused, my hand gravitates to ASIAN
because of my surname.
But how does this identify
my people
who lived on the mouth of
the Yaqui River
along the Yaqui Valley
in haciendas spread on borderless acres
for families of forty or fifty, where
tias y primas formed the dough,
stretching it into round flat tortillas
cooked over open flames while
tios dressed in antlers and loin cloths to
Dance the Dance of the Reindeer.

Before marking an answer,
I glance toward the word MEXICAN,
listed under Hispanic,
as the stories of
slavery, exile, and loneliness
resonate in my mind. I imagine the
escape to Phoenix and Tucson,
my ancestors running-dispersing-
like scattered ants, homeless.
Yet, this journey isn't like the fight of my father
from Canton to Angel Island or the stories of his
village and home,
my grandmother, wife number four,
with three sons,
who lost her left-hand index finger for
the love of her husband
when the Japanese asked-
"Where is he?"

Holding my pen, I draw an "X" over the form,
cross the question out,
wrinkle and ball it up
to throw it away.