“Change” is a word Elona Medina is well familiar with in her work as the technology and media teacher for Alamosa High School. The word “adapt” is another.
“It’s completely different,” she says of her instruction. “I teach all digital media now and there was not a whole lot of that when I first started.”
For her work in helping students tell the story of Alamosa High, Medina was presented with the Adams State University Educator Highlight Award during a presentation this week by Curtis Garcia and faculty and staff from the Adams State School of Education.
“Elona puts in so much time with her students teaching them aspects of technology and media. She takes time outside of school to work with students in videography of extracurricular events,” noted Larissa Pettigrew in her nomination of Medina.
Hers is a teaching career that almost never came to be. Her dad, Eugene Medina, who taught for three decades at Sierra Grande in Fort Garland, at first talked her out of becoming a teacher like him.
“When I was going to graduate from high school, I said, ‘Dad. I think I’m going to be a teacher. He said, ‘Don’t, don’t do it.’ He talked me out of it, so I got an accounting degree and did that for 10 years.”
As Medina learned, if teaching is in your life calling, you will find a way to the classroom, which she did.
“I needed people,” she said of the lonely world of accounting. “So I went back to school. I didn’t tell him. After I said ‘Dad I went back to school.’ He said, ‘What for?’ ‘To get a teaching license.’ He just laughed.”
The career change has worked out well for her. Her students admire her, evidenced by the popularity of the media class at Alamosa High and the skills the students learn from Medina’s instruction.
“What I teach is different. How I teach is different. But I think from Day 1 till now, I’ve always taught from my heart.
“I try to give them skills that can get them a job when they leave my classroom. I try to give them something that they can take with them and use right away.”
In a digital media world, the skills students are gaining in Medina’s classroom can prove to be invaluable. But as she knows, while the tools of today’s media can change, the main reason for her calling as a teacher will never change.
“It’s them,” she says of the classroom full of students participating in her media class at Alamosa High. “They make it fun.”