CLASS ACTS : Jim Grissom: After 22 Years, ‘I Really Love This Place’

After more than a decade of mass layoffs, tight budgets and plunging morale, teaching is making a comeback. Education majors are on the increase. Pay is improving, respect reviving. In some areas, enrollment again is booming and teachers are in short supply--nowhere more than in Santa Ana, Orange County’s biggest, most diverse, fastest-growing district. Here are two Santa Ana teachers--a promising rookie and an award-winning veteran. Both see teaching as a unique job--and mission.

Room 51 at Santa Ana’s Saddleback High School this late-August morning was silent and ghostly.

It was easy to see why: Summer break was not quite over and the returning swarms of students were still a few days away.

Their absence underscored the bleakness of the schoolroom, a claustrophobic, brick-lined enclosure with Formica tables and metal chairs, chemical-element charts on the wall next to the flag, a clock, a pencil sharpener and a green chalkboard.

But chemistry teacher Jim Grissom saw beyond the 30 empty seats and the stereotypical sameness.

Looking about the premises with undisguised affection and anticipation, he was there to set up the lecture room and laboratory unit for his next round of students.

The room has always been Grissom’s home away from home. “I really love this place. It’s the human dimensions in a classroom that make it come alive. The students are great, and this is something I never get tired of doing,” he said grinning, exuding the energy of an eager new teacher.

But Grissom, 47, is hardly a newcomer. The Tucson native has been a professional teacher since 1965, when he joined the Santa Ana Unified School District fresh out of the University of Arizona’s education and science schools.

And his longevity has a twist. He has taught chemistry at this same high school--in this same room--for the past 22 years. On Tuesday, the day classes resume, he begins his 23rd.

Grissom has earned his share of outstanding-teacher awards, including honors from the state Department of Education, California School Boards Assn. and American Chemical Society.

His colleagues said such accolades are well deserved. Grissom’s professional skills, combined with his personal enthusiasm and passion for the sciences, make him an unusually effective teacher, they said.

“He’s dynamic, a truly caring teacher with a wonderful sense of humor,” said one longtime colleague, Nancy O’Connor, the district’s assistant superintendent for secondary schools. “He’s the kind of teacher we wish we could clone.”

Said Saddleback High Principal Bob Nelson: “Jim is not only exceptionally knowledgeable, but he knows how to put the subjects across. His classes are rigorous, but he also makes the content pragmatic and relevant.”

Grissom begins many classroom discussions with media accounts of such controversies as oil spills and toxic waste dumps, then holds brainstorming sessions on the political, economic and social impacts.

To further demystify chemistry for his five daily classes, he uses kitchen cleansers and other chemical-related household staples to illustrate “the everyday presence of chemistry in our lives.”

Humor also plays a key role. “We have to be able to laugh at ourselves. I try to do that in this classroom. I try to have some fun--and make it fun for students.”

One of his students put it this way: “You worry because chemistry seems so difficult,” said Tracy Reines, an honors senior who took Grissom’s class last spring. “But he really makes it clear and meaningful. He relates it to our lives.”

Equally important is Grissom’s classroom zest. “He’s so lively and has this terrific humor,” she added. “He’s enjoying the class--so we are, too.”

But Grissom’s overall goals are serious: “I try to treat students like adults. I expect a high level of maturity from them. My attitude is that if you respect them, they will respect you. You can’t pigeonhole any student. You have to give each student the feeling that you are expecting more of them--that each can aspire, can reach higher.”

Grissom certainly doesn’t underestimate the weightiness of his job. “You have to always be aware of your responsibility as a teacher. It’s the sense that what you’re saying and doing is so crucial,” he said.

“For this short period each day, you’re in charge of their minds. That’s a little awesome but also part of the excitement of this job.”

The ultimate criterion? “I know it may sound trite, but you have to truly love students, to care about them as individuals, to take a personal interest in their futures,” he said.

“You can’t help but become involved. It’s why so many of us go into teaching--and why we stay.”

At one time, though, Grissom almost quit.

It was in the mid-’70s, when education in California--after years of spectacular growth, unswerving fiscal support and high esteem--became battered by sweeping cutbacks, dwindling budgets and plunging morale.

The legacy of the protest movements of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was one factor. “There was this tremendous disenchantment with all institutions, a great uncertainty about (educational) values and priorities,” Grissom recalled.

Another factor was more devastatingly direct. Budget restraints affecting schools became oppressive, he said. “On top of that, we had all those other layoffs, such as in aerospace-related industries. The feeling was that if educated people couldn’t get jobs, what was the use of going to school?”

The image of teachers suffered dramatically, and some people belittled teaching as a career, Grissom said. “It was crushing to hear because we were doing something important, and we felt other people would feel the same way, including those taking potshots at us.”

School board tension in Santa Ana only made the situation worse. The district was rocked by board clashes between conservative and moderate-liberal factions and prodded by the rapidly increasing numbers of Latino and other ethnic-minority students in once predominantly Anglo Santa Ana.

The turmoil in education, nationally and locally, took its toll. Some of his teacher friends quit, said Grissom, who lives in Mission Viejo with his wife and three children. “I thought seriously about it, too, but I had a family to raise, and it meant starting from scratch (in another field),” he said.

But then, he added, “I’m not sure if I could have really left teaching, not something you really love doing, no matter what people said.”

Since then, the ‘80s have produced an upswing in support for education, including signs that teaching is again being regarded as a prestigious profession.

Grissom can even joke about it. “Teachers don’t have to slink around anymore. People are saying nice things about us again.”

And at the Santa Ana district level, he sees a “more open and trusting atmosphere,” due in large part to a less ideologically split board and more innovative programs for the still-growing, now predominantly ethnic-minority population. (Among Saddleback High’s 2,400 students, the enrollment is now 65% Latino and 20% Asian/Pacific.)

Recently, the board and the Santa Ana Educators Assn., representing the district’s 1,800 teachers, quietly reached agreement on a new three-year contract--a far cry from the rancorous exchanges and picketing over previous contracts, said Grissom, an association vice president and chairman of its negotiating team.

The cooperation is especially critical, he said, because the Santa Ana district, the county’s largest and one of the fastest growing in the state, is among those hardest hit by the latest statewide crisis--a massive teacher shortage.

The recruiting dilemma pressures Santa Ana and other districts to find and develop more new teachers, boost salaries and other “job attractions,” and extend efforts to keep veteran teachers from quitting too early. The latter efforts include programs to revitalize “burnt-out cases,” Grissom said.

Most districts have tended to neglect and to take for granted their “human resources”--the teachers,” he said. “The general feeling was like this: ‘Fine, you got your credentials. Now go out and teach!’ There wasn’t enough appreciation, enough nurturing to keep teachers productive and improving. Or enough voice in program innovations and decision-making.”

Grissom is himself a prime role model for colleagues.

He still thrives on the teachers’ long hours, including paper grading, lesson planning and student conferences continuing long after the regular class day.

He is a voracious reader of the latest scientific literature and has participated in research projects, including some at UC Irvine, on ways to improve the teaching of the sciences.

And he is part of the district’s mentor-teacher program, a senior corps to advise newcomers on professional and personal techniques.

“You never stop learning--not about your subjects and profession, not about your students or yourself. It’s a never-ending creative process,” said Grissom, who now makes $47,300 a year, plus $4,000 for mentor advising and $1,500 for chairing Saddleback High’s science department.

“You know something?” Grissom said. “I still get excited about the start of a new year, a new class. I’m never bored. I always have a grand time.”

As he stood behind his desk, looking across the rows of vacant seats, he suddenly grinned. “It’s always like my first day--all over again.”