Teaching Team Gets Results With PRIDE
Bob Buck and Jamie Koskela, Kennedy High School teaching partners, believe that given the opportunity and support, any teenager can succeed in school. This dynamic duo should know. Their innovate teaching program has produced outstanding scholars for nearly eight years.
“Our kids know that what they’re doing is worthwhile, even though it’s quite demanding and challenging,” Buck, 48, said. “With each year, they’re more enthralled with their success.”
Koskela, 36, agreed. “So many kids don’t think about the future. We help create options for them.”
The program that’s lighting up these teenagers’ lives is called PRIDE--Positive Results through Interdisciplinary-Driven Education--and the curriculum is as challenging as its name.
Buck and Koskela’s 120 PRIDE students--selected at random--tackle a four-year program that includes math, English and social studies, with each subject tied into the other.
The 10th- and 11th-graders also share homeroom period, where Buck and Koskela conduct “cultural literacy” seminars, designed to improve the students’ understanding of common references to the Bible, American and English literature, science, architecture and music. Daily homework and quizzes accompany the lessons.
“They complain about all the work in the beginning,” Buck said. “But by 10th grade they’re producing the most sophisticated and thoughtful work. They’ve begun to be critical thinkers.”
Buck and Koskela spend more than half the summer planning the rigorous program, and weekends are spent reading the students’ assignments.
The kids “need to know that the teacher really wants to read what they have to say, that we’re not just there to pick up a paycheck,” Buck said.
“We’re very relaxed as a team,” Koskela added. “We’ve done this long enough that we can finish each other’s thoughts. We know we can count on the other to get the work done. It takes a lot of the pressure off.”
Buck, who is divorced, and Koskela, the married mother of two, are no strangers to the rigors of teaching.
A UCLA graduate, Buck says he stumbled into the profession after briefly considering a career in engineering. The Los Angeles native taught at Pacoima’s Maclay Junior High for 17 years, followed by a six-year stint at Cleveland High School in Reseda, where he and Koskela met and developed the PRIDE curriculum in 1990.
By the end of the 1996 school year, Koskela, a Valley native and Cleveland graduate herself, decided it was time for a change of scenery, so she and Buck applied as a team to Kennedy High in Granada Hills, where they were hired with the understanding that they could continue their program.
“There’s so much potential in these kids, that it’s a pleasure to watch them mature and blossom.” Koskela said. “They need the support and I’m glad to be making a difference for them.”
Buck agrees.
“The minute you go into teaching, you make a decision as to whether you’re in it for yourself or the kids. If you go into it for the kids, you get so much out of it. If you go into it for yourself, you sour quickly. I’m very lucky that I found a career I love. It’s been great.”
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