Throughout the next few months, students will be eligible to receive a Bruin Pride award. Every teacher gives an award to the student of their choice, seeking to recognize those who aren’t normally acknowledged but who improve the classroom environment.
The first ceremony occurred Wednesday, Feb. 17 while the last one will be Wednesday, April 13. Activities director, David Egan, said the awards help to make sure certain students’ valuable qualities don’t go unnoticed.
“What I’ve always appreciated about Bruin Pride is that I sort of felt like ultimately there isn’t any sort of restrictive criteria for how you choose a kid. It’s really at the discretion of the teacher to identify a student that they feel is deserving of recognition, Egan said. “A lot of the time the teachers might pick someone who isn’t recognized a lot. Maybe someone chooses a kid that has demonstrated incredible strength from the beginning of the year to now.”
Junior Trentyn Davis received a Bruin Pride award from his A.P. World teachers Katherine Sasser and Rachel Proffit last year.. The 20-minute ceremony was filled with teachers boasting the good work of their students and was completed with a complementary certificate, pen and snacks. Davis believes the award shouldn’t be taken lightly as it’s a sign that a student is having a positive impact. He said he thinks he received the award for a variety of reasons.
“I think they liked how I had a mixture of academic success and motivation as well as an interest in the arts and an awareness of politics,” Davis said. “I think being an avid participator in class was a contributor. All of those qualities were factors in getting nominated.”
Although Davis had multiple beneficial characteristics, Egan said this isn’t always the case.
“There was a year when I was teaching where I chose a student who didn’t have any exceptional qualities except his good natured sense of humor that gave him this innate ability to have the whole class laughing,” Davis said “Every day he would get us laughing and not in a manner that was distracting to the learning environment but one that actually served to sort of build the community of the classroom and make everybody comfortable. So I kinda felt like even though all he did was make us laugh, what an incredible benefit to our classroom environment.”
At the end of the day, Egan shares Davis’s perception of the award. He said although his administrative role in organizing the event isn’t particularly tough, it’s rewarding for not only students but also for himself.
“Those students who were chosen I’d hope that they would appreciate how special that is especially because a lot of our teachers have got 150 to 200 students. For that teacher to chose that one student for recognition — that’s pretty special,” Egan said. “That’s pretty awesome because one of the responses we commonly get from our faculty is ‘It’s so hard to chose just one student, I’ve got a lot great kids, can I pick two?’. So it’s pretty special and I hope the kids understand and appreciate that.”
Have you ever received an award? If so, how was  achieving it meaningful for you?