The great teachers behind Tuesday’s candidates

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angelafredriksen.jpg

Angela Fredriksen, at St. Joseph High School in Westchester, inspired students to record their thoughts in journals. She made a lasting impression on state Rep. Christian Mitchell, D-Chicago. Photo courtesy of St. Joseph.

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For all the grief folks like to give politicians, the best of them share a desire to make the world a better place. We suspect they crossed paths at some point with terrific teachers who put such notions in their heads.

The Sun-Times Editorial Board asked candidates in state legislative races to reflect on the most important teachers in their lives. Here’s what some of them had to say.

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A sophomore English teacher at St. Joseph High School in Westchester who exhorted her students to read and record their thoughts in journals put down seedlings of a political career for state Rep. Christian Mitchell, D-Chicago.

The teacher, Angela Fredriksen, “believed in me when few others did and taught me how to express myself and the value of doing so,” Mitchell wrote in a Sun-Times questionnaire.

It’s hard to imagine the polished Mitchell struggling to find his voice. But words didn’t come easily in high school, he says, as his mother battled cancer, his grandparents fought illnesses and he set his sights on college. “No male in my family had ever completed college,” he wrote. “I was one of few African-American kids in many of my honors classes.”

Mitchell found an outlet in books and writing. “It allowed me both to escape for a moment and exhale and to deal with my feelings in a constructive, creative way,” he said.

By the time she completed fifth grade in the 1980s, community organizer Jay Travis, Mitchell’s opponent in the 26th District, had written and produced short films with her classmates. The productions were assignments in the fifth-grade class of Virgie Woods at Horace Mann Elementary in South Chicago. “We actually filmed and edited projects on school grounds,” Travis wrote. “She was a profoundly inspiring educator.”

Harish I. Patel, a Democratic candidate in the Northwest Side’s 40th House District, arrived in the U.S. from India at age 14. He attended three high schools as his family moved around, and at his final one, Niles North in Skokie, he met Nikki Zarefsky, a specialist in English language learning. “I remember the way she took her time and was patient with me as I had trouble understanding and saying the sounds for the letters ‘v’ and ‘w,’ ” Patel wrote of Zarefsky, who died last year at 65. “Her experience as a social worker and a reading teacher came through in those moments.”

Carolyn Schofield, a Republican House candidate in the northwest suburban 66th District, was a science whiz growing up in Arlington Heights. Years before she earned an engineering degree, Schofield attended Juliette Low Elementary, where fifth-grade teacher Frank Novak in 1983 gave Schofield her first C. “I was a bit of a perfectionist so I was so upset,” Schofield wrote. “He pulled me aside and told me to snap out of it. ‘This may be first time you get a poor grade but it will not be the last,’ ” she said he told her.

Back in 1979 Martin McLaughlin, a Republican Senate candidate in the far northwest suburban 26th District, looked forward to playing basketball at Elgin Academy. A teacher there, Bill “Doc” Peterman, talked him into also joining the choir and musical productions. Peterman introduced his student to Gene Kelly’s “Singing in the Rain.”

“You needed to be athletic and coordinated to perform in shows,” McLaughlin recalled. “As a freshman I opened the show with a 2-minute monologue, soft-shoe danced with 20 girls alone, sang three songs and kissed a girl.

“I figured nothing in my life could ever be more nerve-racking or embarrassing than what I had just done. Thirty-seven years later looking back, I was right.”

It’s easy to see why Angelica Alfaro, a Democratic Senate candidate in the Northwest Side’s 2nd District, is an advocate for charter schools. She attended Noble Street College Prep, where she met Jocelyn Hathaway, who put Alfaro on course to study at Penn State one summer while still in high school. “It was a first for my entire family,” Alfaro wrote. “That experience changed my life.”

To put it mildly, Jason Gonzales was a teenage troublemaker. He dropped out of high school. But here he is now, at age 42, challenging the most powerful Democrat in Springfield, House Speaker Michael Madigan, in the Southwest Side’s 22nd District.

Gonzales is a long way from serving 71 days in jail for credit card fraud. He eventually received a bachelor’s degree from Duke and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Last year, then-Gov. Pat Quinn pardoned him for his crimes.

His turnaround took shape when he re-enrolled in Barrington High School a good few years older than his classmates — he graduated at 21. An English teacher, Dale Griffith, pulled Gonzales aside and told him he admired Gonzales for pulling himself together.

“For the first time in my life,” Gonzales wrote, “someone told me how much potential I had and believed that I could accomplish anything.”

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