Teacher of the Year award goes to Rogers Park Middle School’s Melody Montgomery.

DANBURY — "Be prompt. Be prepared. Be productive. Be polite.”

The reminder competes with a warning not to whine and a suggestion to practice peace that hang in the front of Melody Montgomery’s classroom at Rogers Park Middle School in Danbury.

The small, third-floor room, chock full of books and posters about the past, came alive as the blond, smiling Montgomery told her students of the need to research historical sources they’ll use in class and understand the perspective in which they were created.

In the first 2 days of school this year, her eighth-grade American history students already knew a little of why Montgomery was named Danbury’s Teacher of the Year for the 2003-04 school year.

"I heard from my brother that she was a good teacher and so far she’s really good,” said Elizabeth Doran, 13. "She doesn’t let us fall asleep and she’s been telling us to be the best we can because she was named the top teacher.”

Robert Mitchell said the award means he’ll expect more from Montgomery as a teacher.

"She seems like a really good teacher so far. She already started giving us stuff about current events and telling us why we should learn history,” Robert said. "It’s because it’s important to know the past, that you have to respect the past and learn from the mistakes of the past.”

Montgomery’s award was announced last week at a district-wide orientation. She’ll compete for the state honor next.

"It’s a career high. It’s a big district. It’s an honor and a privilege,” Montgomery said during a class break Friday.

Montgomery, 56, taught in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before coming to Danbury in 1984 to teach social studies. Since 1990, she has taught American history and since 1994, served as the school’s yearbook advisor.

She said her role is to help students put events in history into context.

"You have to think thematically, to connect the pictures and look for the common themes,” she said. "I spend a lot of time on current events and I connect them to what has happened before.”

Through the years, she’s found eighth-graders increasingly mature, which she credited to their exposure to television, video and computers. At the same time, she’s found they need direction in handling social situations more than ever before.

She teaches all levels of students.

"I have some kids some years who are super-motivated and they can fly. Other years, I have students I have to pull along, though I tell them I’m not going to lower the bar,” she said. "I love to teach. I discipline because I have to. It’s part of the job.”

Not only has Montgomery won state and national recognition for herself, she’s found opportunities for her students to compete outside the classroom as well.

In 2001, Montgomery was honored nationally as Connecticut’s first George Washington Scholar. She also has been selected five times for an inter-district state grant for her work on the Amistad Project, about the infamous slave ship. She helped write the Amistad curriculum that is now used in several states.

One of her students won the Connecticut TeenRespect Scholar Award, which included a week in Washington, D.C. A student of hers was published in the National Student Editorial Cartoon Books, another finished third in Connecticut’s History Day and another won a National Poetry Contest.

"Melody is always trying to be a better teacher, a more innovative teacher. She’s an extraordinarily creative person,” said Clare Barnett, the coordinator of social studies for the district. "She is one of the finest examples of what the teacher of the year is.”

Barnett said Montgomery will be presenting her work during a conference of the National Council of Social Studies this year, which illustrates the respect she has earned.

"With her peers she is recognized as an extraordinary practitioner. and she’s an outstanding person too,” Barnett said.

Looking back on her honors, Montgomery beamed when she thought of her week as a George Washington Scholar, during which she lived at Washington’s Virginia homestead.

"Living at Mount Vernon for a week was a history teacher’s dream come true,” she said. "We went into the attic and into the basement and one day I got up and sat on the porch of Mount Vernon at 6 a.m. and watched the sun rise.”

After more than three decades in the classroom, she still finds joy from her students, present and past. One day, she recalled that she and her husband met a former student who came up to her at a coffee shop.

"She said, 'I’m going to be a teacher,’ Montgomery said, and then she added, ‘I’m going to be a history teacher.’ You feel like you might have made a difference.”