At a time when angry debates over school reorganization, bilingual education and sagging test scores seem to drown out everything else, Sherry Beth Stern's voice was consistently comforting.
For 32 years she introduced teenagers to the joys of Shakespeare and the artfully written paragraph--and to the extraordinary capacity of their developing young minds.
Along the way, Stern became a second mother to many of the 12,000 teenagers who passed through classroom C-87 at Birmingham High School, where she taught English. So there were tears of disbelief when Stern, 58, of Santa Monica, died unexpectedly in July after elective surgery.
And there were more tears Sunday as Stern's former students and friends gathered at the Van Nuys campus to celebrate the in-your-face teaching style that helped shape so many lives.
"She was a tornado just blasting across the classroom," said Dave Domike, a 1975 graduate who now is a Van Nuys Internet consultant. "She was the best thing that ever happened in my life."
Stern was an old-fashioned, hands-on teacher who wasn't afraid to rock the boat if a little wave action was needed to get things moving.
She would pick up the telephone and call parents when she sensed youngsters were not working to their potential. She was a grandmaster of praise when a student needed a pat on the back or a word of encouragement whispered in the ear.
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She was the kind of teacher who headed off problems. Like the time she went to the home of a boy whose best friend was killed in a motorcycle crash and put her arms around him when he cried.
She had a knack for making every teenager feel important.
"It's amazing to me that we're all saying the same thing, that we all thought we were the most important student she ever had," marveled Derrel Friedman, a Van Nuys resident who was taught 10th-grade English by Stern in 1969.
It was Friedman who was comforted by Stern when his friend was killed. Friedman said he had kept his emotions pent up for a week until Stern pulled up in her car outside his home. She gently asked if he wanted to talk--and then listened to the boy for more than an hour.
Herbert Rosenbloom, a North Hills resident who took Stern's class 25 years ago, told how the teacher taught him to hold his head high in life. Literally.
