Dutifully, the students in one of the last English classes Patricia Oyeshiku will ever teach at Morse High School take down photographs covering the walls of her familiar room.
There are 3,500 photos, by the teacher's count – all of former students.
“Ooh, remember her,” blurts reigning class cutup Will McPherson at the sight of one snapshot. “She used to call in sick to school but always show up at Ms. O's class.”
He pauses and points to one of his classmates across the room.
“And she used to ditch every one of her classes except this one. Everyone loves to be in Ms. O's classroom. Everyone loves Ms. O.”
HOWARD LIPIN / Union-Tribune
Students like these in Patricia Oyeshiku's fifth-period world literature class, one of the last she'll teach at Morse High, loved it when she would hold court in the O world. She's the best at making you laugh and have fun while you're learning, the kids say.
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“Ms. O” – or, more formally, Dr. Patricia Oyeshiku – is a Morse High icon. She's a one-time California Teacher of the Year who had been on the campus of Morse – the only school where she ever taught – for 37 years.
And from the moment she walked through the doors of her bungalow classroom in 1971, she was more than an educator who made English lessons come alive.
Oyeshiku, 63, has been a mother, a sister and a friend to every student who would come her way.
“It has been like family here (in her classroom),” she says during that last class. “I've taught sons and daughters of kids I've had over the years. And it has all been fun. I enjoyed every minute of it.”
But now, she adds, it's time to call it a career.
Dr. Patricia Oyeshiku retired in June. Her former students will hold a retirement celebration in her honor at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center in Mission Valley Saturday, beginning at 6 p.m.
Guests – most, former students – are expected to come in from all over the world.
“I treated all of my students as individuals, and I didn't (play favorites),” Oyeshiku says. “I had strict rules; I graded papers and tests and homework assignments on 0 to 100, and I didn't accept anything late.
“And I've flunked some who were friendly and passed some who weren't so friendly – I'm tough that way. But all my students loved me, regardless.”
Indeed.
Jacqui Turner, a Ms. O student in the early 1980s who scrambled for weeks planning the retirement party, cried when she learned her son, a Morse junior, won't get to study under her old English teacher.
“I was so upset,” Jacqui says. “She's been like a second mother to me.” She's what all students need.
Adds recent graduate Randy Palma, 19, who plans to attend Southwestern College and eventually transfer to the nursing program at University of California San Diego: “I'd have to say I liked Ms. O's way of teaching. She has to be the best teacher I've ever had. In her class I felt free, and it made me become a better person.”
Randy and others say Oyeshiku always tied her lessons to real-life situations.
A mother of two and grandmother of three, she tells you she was a “nerd” – her high school valedictorian at 15 – who always leaned toward teaching.
She got hooked on it at 8 after she helped her grown next-door neighbor learn to read.
Growing up the oldest of four kids raised in Miami in the segregated South, she says, she was also exposed to a loving and nurturing community. And the sense of all that always guided her in her teaching.
When you'd walk into Oyeshiku's classroom, with its bright purple and white walls, you walked into the O world.
She had what she'd call O discussions every Friday in which the class would talk about a topic picked out of a container filled with signed and unsigned notes written by classmates.
Oyeshiku would regularly have the class work on large projects in study groups she'd call OLCs (Oyeshiku Learning Communities). And for outstanding classroom performances, she'd hand out hand-made certificates she dubbed O Awards.
To her students, those awards were the most prestigious on campus.
She remembers, chuckling, how a former professional basketball player, who was once her student, lamented during a recent visit that he'd never gotten an O Award. And he asked her if she could finally give him one for his scrapbook.
After graduating from Knoxville College in Tennessee, Oyeshiku spent four years in the Peace Corps, working in Brazil, San Francisco, Boston and Pullman, Wash., where she met Anthony, her husband of 40 years.
She calls the architect from the huge family in Lagos, Nigeria, “the most wonderful husband in the world” and says her many extended family experiences and those from her Peace Corps days enhanced her teaching.
She adds, too, that the Teacher of the Year award she received in 1981 seemed to validate her in other people's eyes, and it exposed her to the inner workings of the state's education system.
But none of it, she says, ever effected her self-evaluation.
“My defining moments come when I run into former students and I see them being worthwhile, contributing members of society,” she says, adding that she finds herself doing that a lot these days.
But Oyeshiku says she knew it was time to leave teaching when she realized her work schedule had begun to interfere with other things she wants to do as a wife and grandmother.
In the O world, students would also get a “moment in the sun.” That was time Oyeshiku would set aside at the end of the year for them to openly express their opinions about their year in her class.
Classmates call Shanee (as in Shahnay) Harrell “Sha-late” because, she admits, “I'm always late.” In living up to her nickname, she turned in one of her final English class assignments past the deadline, and Ms. O said Shanee wouldn't be allowed to make her speech.
But the perky 17-year-old flashes a wider smile than usual as she heads to the front of the room. The smile is not so much because Ms. O says a class vote for leniency got Shanee a reprieve. She's giddy because she, like everyone else present, knows Ms. O would never have prevented her from making her speech.
The teacher wants her students to learn from doing stuff like this even in the final days of school and her career.
“Ms. O is cool,” Will says. “Yeah, I'm going to miss her.”
Every student who's ever learned from her is going to miss Ms. O.
