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Joy Duerksen

Champion Mountain Bike Racer, PE Teacher, Friend

How many teachers do you know who have calf tattoos exactly the size and shape of a mountain bike disk brake? Meet Joy Duerksen, United States National Champion Mountain Bike Racer (women's expert class, 2007, California Champion in 2006 and 2007).

Joy is PE teacher at Redlands Academy, an Adventist school in California, where she teaches girls in grades 6-10 along with additional classes in health and geography.

"She's the best teacher I've had," says one of her students. "She's hard on us, but we all know she really likes us!"

"I can't imagine riding as many miles as she does each week," says one of her fellow teachers, "but one of the best places to find Joy is somewhere up in the mountains near Big Bear-riding lickety-split through the trees."

Joy rides 150-200 miles per week, plus races. Though she has raced with Specialized for the past several years, in 2009 she's racing as a PRO and is on a new team racing for Trek Bicycles-and riding a fancy new Gary Fisher bike. Though most of her racing is on mountain bikes, she's recently added a number of road races to her schedule-and has just won the Boulevard SW 3/4 in Southern California.

"Amazing!" Joy wrote after the Boulevard race. "Hardest day on the bike I can remember. My race was in 36-degree weather with steady heavy rain with standing water. It came down to an uphill 5-mile finish with one girl and me going back and forth. But with 200 m to go I sprinted to clinch the win."

The "tattoo?" She blew a tire halfway down a mountain, and while changing the tube slipped her leg far too close to the disk brake. It was "red-hot" and left a permanent reminder on her leg.

Mike Copithorne

7th and 8th Grade Teacher, Husband, Father,
Sky-diver, Fly-fisherman, Paraplegic

"I am promoting happiness and a future in a world that doesn't have a very good future. I'm promoting something far bigger than the problems these kids are going to face. It's bigger than a career and bigger than making money. It's tied directly into serving others," Mike says.

Mike has every reason to be unhappy.

A champion wakeboarder, Mike was snowboarding in Mammoth, California during college-doing a move he'd done hundreds of times-when he over-rotated doing a 540 over a 45-foot table-top jump and overshot the landing. The blunt trauma upon landing made him a T9-T10 paraplegic from the waist down.

You'd think that would slow Mike down—but no. He went on to marry his college sweetheart and become a father ... and a teacher at Napa Christian School, an Adventist School in Napa, California.

"I'm very passionate about teaching and about my kids, and I'm wearing out the knobby tires on my titanium wheelchair," he laughs.

As an educator he hopes to inspire kids. "There's a lot going on in 7th and 8th grades, cognitively and emotionally. It's a changing dynamic relationship, shifting away from parents and teachers more toward friends. Guiding them through that is challenging. You kind of have to have tough skin," he explains. "You've got to let them know you love them first, before anything else. So I try to take time to go out of my way and get to know them individually. I try to get out of the classroom as much as possible with them and I can't tell you how many baseball games, basketball games, bar mitzvahs, and parties I've been to with them. But that's part of my job."

As Mike sees it, his job is not to be a parent but to help guide his students through this important decision-making time of their lives-most importantly, helping them make steps toward God and shaping the people they are. His wheelchair, he explains, is actually an asset in his teaching, because it shows his students that no matter what's thrown their way, the world is open to possibilities for them.