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Desert Hills Teachers Earns National Award
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Kathy Lindstrom, a language arts teacher at Desert Hills High School, has earned a “Teacher of Honor” designation from Kappa Delta Pi, an international honor society in education. Lindstrom joins a small group of remarkable educators recognized with this honor, and is the first teacher to receive the award for 2010.
“It is because of her passion and leadership that Ms. Lindstrom has achieved such success with students in helping them achieve,” says Principal Art Madden. “With her assistance, Desert Hills reached the highest level of state testing achievement.”
Lindstrom is a 21-year veteran teacher, and has worked with a wide variety of students in California and Arizona. In her years at Desert Hills, she has served as English Department Chair, where she has mentored new English teachers, and led the curriculum development of courses, with specific attention to the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) preparation course.
Ms. Lindstrom’s work in the English department has helped boost student test scores by 40 percent. Additionally, she played an integral role in assisting DHHS meet full national accreditation with AdvancED.
She has been a member of the Arizona Department of Education’s (ADE) AIMS committees since 2005, and has assisted the state in developing both the AIMS reading tests and the scoring for the AIMS writing exam.
ADE Deputy Associate Superintendent Robert Alley called Lindstrom “a valuable contributor to creating and maintaining the integrity of the AIMS exam.” Alley also says that “it is only with dedicated educators such as Ms. Lindstrom that ADE can keep the AIMS a reliable and valid measure of the academic standards.”
Lindstrom has been an active volunteer at Phoenix Rescue Mission, a nonprofit organization that cares for the poor and needy through homeless emergency services, addiction recovery, and family and community outreach. Additionally, she is vice president of the Arizona Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, through which she manages, recruits, and maintains the membership of the organization.
She is earning her Doctor of Education at Northcentral University, and holds her MA in Curriculum and Instruction and a BA in English.
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Cougar Football Ends On A High Note
Photo Credit: Kelsey Haasch
The Cougar football squad
The Desert Hills Cougar Football Team ended its 2009 season on a record-breaking note, with a trip to the semifinals against Heritage Academy. The Cougars lost the match, held recently at Phoenix Christian High School, but earned a place as one of the top teams in their division. Head Coach Joe Garcia said the Cougars played “a tremendous game,” and he saluted the effort of the hard-working students.
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DVD Review: ‘Coraline’ Is Creepy And Captivating
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Written by Cougar Press Staff
The film “Coraline” is visually captivating, with stop-action wizardry and a slew of interesting characters, all hamming maddeningly to steal scenes in this children’s film based on the story by author Neil Gaiman.
Gardens bloom in seconds and giant insects crawl with riders gleefully yelping on their backs, as if in some mutant, kaleidoscopic rodeo. Add to that the fact that you’re watching it unfold in colorful 3-D, and you’ve got the makings of an engaging outing for the kids. If only the thing wasn’t so darn creepy.
Normally of course, most parents are loathe to frequent anything smacking of disturbing, dark or suicidal. It’s generally a good rule to live by. That’s not the stuff of happy children’s dreams, though it’s surprising how many kids’ movies rely on shriek value to sell their stories and Happy Meals.
Many parents were upset, for instance, with the film “Igor,” which seemed from the trailers to be reliably scary, yet also reasonably safer than staying at home and risking flipping the channel to televised atrocities in Afghanistan – or worse, the subprime mortgage meldown.
Of course, the “Igor” trailers didn’t focus on the suicidal cat, which spends the flick trying to kill itself in increasingly creative ways. Naturally, the inevitable question arises: “Dad, what’s suicide?” To which most parents will respond with a quick segue into the intricacies of the subprime mortgage crisis. Self-destructive in its own way, true, but more esoteric than killing oneself, and certain to leave everyone healthfully confused by the end of the discussion.
But where “Igor” was creepy and moderately entertaining, “Coraline” was both creepy and exhilarating, featuring a strong heroine willing to risk all by climbing down a more demonic version of the rabbit hole than Alice ever braved, in order to save her parents from the clutches of her “other mother,” an arachnoid limpet with steel, springy needles for fingers and domestic rage seething beneath her apron.
The images were both scary and mesmerizing – truly, a marvel of imagination – although I wondered if they needed to be so dark.
Several times during the film, the kids announced how frightened they were, and they’re not exactly the shrinking types. The boy, for instance, once browbeat me into reading a Halloween story to his kindergarten class, in which a woman literally loses her head when the wrong ribbon is pulled from her neck. The kids, naturally, howled in approval, even as the instructor gave me that severe look mastered only by elementary teachers and Abu Ghraib jailers.
This is not as bad as portraying a self-destructive feline bent on offing itself, but momentary pangs of guilt were involved. Perhaps, then, we can forgive “Igor” and “Coraline” for trying to scare the kids in the name of cinematic excitement. Still, the youngsters are a long way from the dubious teenage thrills of “Halloween in 5D” (sure to come), and I’d like to keep it that way, for as long as humanly possible.
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