Lopez: LEARNING LESSONS FROM A FATHER’S PRIDE IN HIS SON - A visit with a respected instructor shows how success can be nurtured – in a classroom, and in a family.

By Steve Lopez, LA Times columnist :http://lat.ms/yjX78I

Patrick Gordon, a teacher at Gahr High School in Cerritos, is the 2012 winner of the Jaime Escalante Advanced Placement Award. (Gary Friefman / Los Angeles Times / February 29, 2012)

March 3, 2012, 5:50 p.m.  ::  Harry Gordon wasn't exactly pushy in the email he sent me, but he made his point. He said he understood the Miramonte Elementary School scandal was a story that had to be done, but he wondered why there couldn't also be a positive story about teachers. And he had one particular teacher in mind — his son.

I liked the idea that Gordon was sticking up for his son, Patrick, 45, who teaches at Gahr High School in Cerritos and had just won an award named for the legendary East L.A. math teacher Jaime Escalante.

So I said sure.

Harry Gordon and I met for a cup of coffee Wednesday morning across the street from Gahr High before going to watch his son, who teaches history and economics. Harry Gordon had been a teacher too, for 16 years at Westminster High and then 17 years at Huntington Beach High. He's retired now.

"It's easy to be popular as a teacher, and it's easy to be demanding as a teacher, but it's hard to be both," Gordon said, noting that his son manages to do just that.

So it's surprising to hear that as a college student, Patrick had no intention of ever becoming a teacher. He studied political science at UCLA and later went into marketing. But immediately after college, he pulled a brief stint as a substitute teacher to make a few bucks while looking for work in the business world. The job was at his alma mater, Huntington Beach High, and his dad was teaching there at the time.

"His classroom was next door to mine," Harry Gordon said as if it were one of his most cherished memories.

But that didn't last long. Patrick went into business as planned and did fine. But he'd liked his taste of the classroom, and he felt a tug to go back. So he began taking teaching courses while holding down his day job, and 16 years ago, he landed a job at Gahr.

I wondered how much of an influence Harry Gordon had been on his son, but Harry wanted our conversation to be about Patrick, not him. He said he and Patrick's mother split when Patrick was 10, and he hadn't been the father he wanted to be.

"I guess in some ways, by celebrating him, I'm trying to play catch-up."

As we approached the classroom, we could hear Patrick's booming voice. His father had described him as dynamic, and he wasn't kidding.

"He keeps you awake and entertained," said our escort, Emily Vargas, a senior who's in Gordon's Model U.N. class. She wants to be a physician and work with Doctors Without Borders. "When he comes in, it's like, 'I'm going to teach.' And he's like my second dad. If you have any issue, you can talk to him."

Patrick's Advanced Placement U.S. history students had just finished their textbook and now were starting 10 weeks of review in preparation for the AP exam. He knew his students were intimidated, so he began with a story about a former student named Annie.

"She said, 'Oh, my God, Mr. Gordon how am I going to learn all this?' I said, 'Who's Thomas Paine?' She said, 'He wrote "Common Sense," he helped inspire a nation. He wrote "Age of Reason" and spawned the second Great Awakening.' I said, "When you walked in here on Sept. 2, did you know that?' 'No.' 'Well now you know it.' "

For the next hour, Gordon prodded his students not just to remember facts but to consider the thread of American history. Didn't the modern equal rights amendment have its roots just after the American Revolution, with a subtle change in women's roles from being mothers to raising the republic's future leaders? Could the civil rights movement of the 1960s have happened without reconstruction and the rights that were extended to blacks then?

Gordon pokes, he challenges, he plants seeds in the brains of his students and waits for the bloom. He likens teaching to his challenge in marketing, when he had to sell customers on the idea that he had the goods they wanted.

"What did we not join after World War I?"

The League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, students respond.

"What did we absolutely join?"

The United Nations and NATO.

"Every teacher has different gifts, but there's an art to lecture," said the principal, Gina Zietlow. "This is his calling. He's talking about old dead guys and the students hang on his every word."

Gahr assistant principal Larry Natividad said students in the school's population speak 20 languages, and nearly half the families have low enough incomes to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Before Gordon joined the staff 16 years ago, an average of six students a year passed the AP history test.

Now the number is in the 40s.

"He debunked prior expectations," Natividad said in a nominating letter to College Board, the national college-readiness group that honored Gordon with the Escalante award.

There's no one teaching approach that works, Patrick Gordon said. There's a notion that "if we all just had the right lessons and we all just taught the same way, what would come out at the end is a Model T Ford, and it's not a production process in that way." What works at Gahr, he said, is continuity. The teachers in his department know all the students, they meet regularly to strategize on how to get the most out of each one, and they visit one another's classes to learn from one another's strengths.

After class, Patrick said several of his family members have been educators. But he recalled that when he was a kid, his father read "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Old Man and the Sea" to him with feeling and in dialect, and he later saw his father do the same in the classroom. He remembers admiring his dad for the wonder he saw in the eyes of those kids, and he has since met teachers who told him they got into the profession because they were inspired by his father.

When he got the Escalante award, Patrick said, he was quick to suggest he wasn't even the best teacher in the family.

Hearing this, his dad was speechless. Father and son hugged, and Patrick Gordon began preparing for his next class.