To Lorin Kubishta, history isn’t dry, disconnected facts — it’s something to dive into with a twisting, headfirst somersault.

The Helix history teacher rarely gives tests or worksheets. He believes an appreciation of history must be embedded in students’ psyches using a more experiential approach. He introduces the idea at the beginning of the school year.

“To me, it all boils down to one word — gratitude,” he tells them. “If you don’t know the stories of people who went before, you are being ungrateful. It’s up to you to know them and keep them alive.”

Kubishta is Oregon’s 2014 winner of the Patricia Behring Teacher of the Year Award, given out last week at the University of Maryland during the annual National History Day competition. The award, sponsored in part by the History Channel, pays each state winner $500.

Kubishta didn’t start out dreaming about teaching history, earning a degree in business education instead. At Griswold High School, his natural curiosity and love of history led him to expand his horizons. Now, he often meshes history and technology, guiding his students as they create historical documentaries for the annual Natural History Day competition. His students compete locally, the top two in each category going to state. This year, four of his students reached national competition.

The teacher said the process is far from simple for his students. When asked what they have to do, he said, “Really, what don’t they have to do?”

“They latch onto a story and research it. They contact historical societies and museums,” he said. “They get on the phone, do emails and set up interviews. They construct a video using video editing software. They write a narrative, perform it and find music that fits. Then they present the documentary to judges and defend it.”

Kubishta said history comes alive for them as they interview people for the documentaries or the school’s ongoing oral history project. He recalled one student who dreaded her oral history interview with a World War II pilot. Soon, however, she was absorbed by his experiences.

“She said she sat down with this old man and pretty soon, he wasn’t an old man,” Kubishta said. “He was 18 years old and telling his story.”

Kubishta admitted he sometimes gets a little emotional in the classroom. One day, he showed his class the video “WWII in HD,” where war correspondent Robert Sherrod traveled with Marines as they fought the Battle of Guadalcanal and others.

“He wrote about what these guys saw and what they had to go through,” Kubishta said. “At one point, I stopped the video and said, ‘Look what they did for you.’ To be able to know that someone put their life on the line, and in many cases gave their life, to preserve our ideals. They’ve been handed this responsibility to use that gift and not waste it.”

Students have reached out to historical figures to get their personal stories. Over the years, Helix students interviewed a Navajo code talker, Iwo Jima veterans, the copilot of Jimmy Doolittle and Norma McCorvey — the Roe in Roe v. Wade. They talked to family or friends of other icons — Bill Bowerman, Jackie Robinson, Elvis Presley, Rosa Parks, Chief Joseph and Harriet Tubman.

Senior Alexis Keene and partner Morgan Warner communicated via Skype with Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King, for their documentary last April. She described Kubishta as passionate about history.

“Mr. K just wants everyone to see history and experience it,” Keene said. “He really wants us to understand it’s not just a time in the past, it helped build us up today.”

During the recent trip to Washington, D.C., with the four students who reached NHD nationals, he “walked their butts off” during a tour of the monuments. They located the names of three Vietnam veterans from Umatilla County on the Vietnam Memorial wall, including a Helix farmhand who died in a helicopter crash. They met with Rep. Greg Walden and visited Arlington Cemetery, where they located the graves of men they’d read about in “Flags of our Fathers.”

Denise Brock, education manager at the Oregon Historical Society, nominated Kubishta for the Patricia Behring award. She said the Helix teacher has motivated students to nationals for a number of years, 14 to be exact, even when state competition stopped from 2006 through 2012 for lack of funds.

“Lorin was doing it on his own,” Brock said. “That’s a lot of commitment. His kids are always strong.”

Kubishta hopes to offer future students the opportunity to learn that history doesn’t have to be dusty and dry.

“History is alive,” he said. “History doesn’t feel like history when you’re living through it. Those people didn’t say, ‘Hey, this is history.'”

Contact Kathy Aney at kaney@eastoregonian.com or call 541-966-0810.