Dan Anderson is a History Teacher at Grant High School in Portland.  This is what his nominator and student, Libby Friedman, had to say about him:

Mr. Anderson is one of the most amazing teachers I have ever known. Every morning, he plays the “Song of the Day”, so when we walk into class, we are excited. He also has weekly topics that don’t have to do with history, but are used to help us become better human beings. For example: One topic we did was Ideas. Every day of the week, we wrote down a quote he picked, that helped us think about Ideas. One quote was "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come" - Victor Hugo.  After about 5 minutes of writing the quote down, he will spend about 10 minutes talking about the topic. During the week of Ideas, we talked about where our emotions come from. For example: The action of bullying comes from emotions that the bully has. The emotions could be anger, insecurity, and sadness. Mr. Anderson talked about how schools only pay attention to the emotions, but really, we need to go farther. Stirring up the emotions, are beliefs, or ideas. The idea that “I have no value”, or “I have a terrible life”, or even that “people don't love me”; all of those beliefs could cause bullying. Since I have personally had trouble with being bullied, when Mr. Anderson told us about these emotions that bullies have and their ideas, I started to feel bad for those who bully me. Mr. Anderson’s class is never boring. We always do an assortment of things, rather than just one activity, keeping us awake, and on our toes. One day, when it was snowing, he let us turn the whole room around for the first part of class so we could watch the snow as he talked about our Topic of the Week. Mr. Anderson is dedicated and puts a lot of energy into making his class enjoyable, and fun. He is funny, smart, and kind and his students feel like they can talk to him about anything.

Congratulations Dan Anderson from K103!