RANCHO CUCAMONGA >> In general, there are two main paths to becoming a teacher: Either they were laser-focused on it since they were a child or they came to it after an entirely different career. Crystal Cammon followed both paths.
“I actually have a business degree and worked in marketing,” Cammon said, sitting in her classroom at Cucamonga Elementary School, where she teaches fourth-grade math.
She had grown up wanting to be a teacher, and taught her siblings growing up, but things got complicated for her along the way.
“I became a single mom as a teenager and I knew that teaching wasn’t an option, because I knew I had to do student teaching,” she said.
Raising a child alone, working, going to school and working as an unpaid student teacher just wasn’t realistic.
So Cammon went what seemed like the practical route and found herself doing marketing for the Press-Enterprise newspaper in Riverside.
“I liked my job, I liked the people, but — I don’t know — I guess that I wasn’t fulfilled.”
And then, in 1996, Gov. Pete Wilson signed Class Size Reduction into law, providing additional funds for public school districts to hire extra teachers to get the ratio of students to teachers in the lowest grades down to 20-to-1. (And yes, the recession of the early 21st century has walked most of those gains back over the years.) Suddenly, districts couldn’t find enough qualified teachers to hire, and they began to hire them without teaching credentials on an emergency waiver basis.
Cammon decided to make the jump. She quit her job and started substitute teaching.
• Video: Why Cammon loves teaching
“The first two days, I went home and cried because I thought I made the biggest mistake.”
The first day was rude and hostile middle school students. The second was a group of wild and out of control third graders — one of whom threw a textbook at her.
“But on my third day, I taught fourth grade, and I was in love — in love,” she said.
And 19 years later, she’s still teaching, 17 of them at Cucamonga Elementary School. More than that, she’s thrived: Earlier this month, Cammon was named one of San Bernardino County’s three Teachers of the Year.
The award was no surprise to her principal, Joyce Kozyra.
“Crystal Cammon is truly a professional educator,” Kozyra wrote in an email. “Her knowledge of her grade level curriculum combined with her expertise in technology ensures an outstanding educational experience for all her students. She is caring and compassionate to all those she serves. She consistently goes above and beyond in putting students’ needs first. Her ability to work collaboratively with her peers is exceptional.”
For more of her 19 years, Cammon has been a kindergarten teacher — no books being thrown or students bullying her there — but that’s by no means all she spent her time on. She’s also running a pilot version of an after-school computer coding class, mentoring two less-experienced teachers and serves on a raft of committees. (And for several summers, she’s flown to Cambodia to teach English to street children.)
And in her classroom, Cammon works hard to make learning — and learning math, specifically — fun.
“I really feel like we’ve taken a lot of play out of the elementary years,” she said. “When they come into the upper grades, they sometimes don’t have the social skills.”
So her students are taught to work in collaboration and reward one another for being helpful students. They collect recyclables and vote on which charities to support — right now, they’re saving up to adopt a manatee.
And she’s very, very passionate about teaching.
“I feel like we are agents of the future,” she said. “When I worked for business, yeah, I would get PGA tickets. But I hear ‘I love math, thank you’ from my students, and I know they mean it with all their hearts.”
Cammon, along with Alta Loma high School teacher Caroline Owen-Nolte and Mesa View Middle School teacher Randal Peters, will be honored at a ceremony at the Oct. 7 meeting of the San Bernardino County Board of Education.
