Arcadia Teacher of Year could shake up the teacher tenure debate

By SHEL SEGAL
As this year’s Teacher of the Year recipient for the Arcadia Unified School District, Patrick Tierney has an idea that would shake up the teacher tenure debate that is going on throughout the state currently.
“With new teachers, I would want to make them untouchable for five years,” said Tierney, who is a longtime Spanish teacher at Arcadia High School. “Learn the craft in five years. Then we’ll make a decision. Now, some of these guys are saying just 16 months and you’ve got tenure. In March of your second year, that’s when this decision is made. I just don’t know if that’s time enough.”
Tierney added the advice he gives to new teachers isn’t always what they are used to hearing.
“When I talk to young teachers, I tell them, ‘Be comfortable in what you do. Don’t be afraid to ask how do you do something,'” Tierney said
Tierney grew up in Pennsylvania where his father was a newspaper man. He remembers meeting baseball star Roberto Clemente as a youth and interviewing him because his father had sent him to Mexico to learn Spanish.
He attended both the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania before coming west to California.
Tierney said there is a type of magic that transpires in a classroom that doesn’t happen any other place.
“Yes, you have to have subject level competency, but you have to want to be with the students,” he said. “You have to do the (mundane) work that comes with it, like grading, but there is a transaction that goes on in class every day and you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
And it is that which comes from the students that have kept him coming back all these years.
“As a teacher you have to not just role with the punches, but you have to deal with that,” Tierney said.
He added in order to be a good teacher you need to love learning, no matter what your age.
“I can’t say that I learned about teaching in the 1970s or the 1980s,” he said. “I learn stuff all the time.”
But the students that keep him coming back.
“The biggest thrill that I get is when my seniors come back and tell me they decided to double-major in bio and Spanish,” Tierney said.
(Shel Segal can be reached at ssegal@beaconmedianews.com and followed via Twitter @segallanded).

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