Portola High School’s Shelley Godett didn’t know she was good at math – or that she wanted to be a teacher – until a Saddleback College professor inspired her.
“He made everything click, and a lot of it was his attitude, that you can do hard things,” says Godett, who was inspired to change her major, enroll at Cal Poly and teach math for the next 26 years – 10 of them at Portola High.
Godett learned her lesson so well that the Irvine Unified School District has named her Teacher of the Year for high school. Beloved by her students for her skill at making math fun – with trigonometry songs and mnemonics, a math club and after-school tutoring – she says her “nonnegotiable” with herself is that “I talk to every single student at least once every single day.”
That’s no small feat, considering she has nearly 200 students.
“At the end of the day, not every student is going to be a math major; but if they can feel seen and heard and have their teacher give them a little bit of grace, I think that goes a long way,” she says.
“I still use the things I learned from Mrs. Godett’s classes every day,” says former student Kevin Du, now in his senior year at Harvard, where he’s majoring in computer science and statistics and doing some volunteer teaching of his own. “She’s enthusiastic, encouraging and practical, and her teaching style has definitely rubbed off on me,” he says. “She explained math concepts in a very intuitive way, how they naturally solve a particular problem or how they explain a pattern we could see.”
