Long-time English teacher set to retire

Glen Ridge High School teacher Stephanie Pollak will be retiring next month after 35 years in the district, all at the high school.

She wore many hats during this time, teaching English, intro to Psychology, AP Psychology, Creative Writing (she founded and advised the school literary magazine, In Between, in 1994), Public Speaking and Journalism, once serving as advisor to the school newspaper.

“It has been a wonderful experience getting to teach students in so many life stages and in these different contexts,” she said. “Terry Fitzsimmons, a former French teacher, was a friend and mentor to me when I started out. She was so helpful in showing me the ropes and helping me figure out the way things worked here and her sense of humor and way of interacting with the students helped me take things a little less seriously.”

Pollak grew up in Westfield and attended Clark University in Worcester, Mass., majoring in psychology and minoring in English. She took her masters, in secondary education, at Harvard University School of Education. Her mother was an English teacher, something Pollak said she thought to do herself someday.

“The teacher who truly inspired me was my English teacher at Westfield High School, Robert Eyres,” she said. “I actually reached out to him after I had been teaching for a while and told him how much he inspired me with his wisdom, humor and engaging lessons.”

She decided last year to retire.

“I still love what I do and committed to it,” she said, and considering how she has changed as a teacher over the years, “but if there’s things that irritate me (now), they’re easier to let go.”

She said the good experiences with colleagues and students she will always remember and now more than ever.

“Relationships have been the most important aspect to teaching for me,” she said, remarking that what made post-Covid teaching difficult was the struggle some of her home-bound students experienced.

Her biggest teaching challenge is getting kids to read, primarily because of the intrusion of technology. But that is universal and consequently, she said, more teachers are going back to paper. Pollak has caught students using AI to write essays so now the work is done in the classroom over several days.

“Right now, I’m teaching “Persepolis,” a memoir about a woman growing up in Iran during the revolution told in graphic style,” she said. “It’s slower to read, for me, because I have to focus on the pictures, but they breeze right through it.”

“Persepolis,” by Marjane Satrapi, was published in the U.S., by Pantheon Books, in 2003. The Iranian Revolution was in 1979.

“I’m getting through to students,” she said. “When I see their passion growing, it’s very satisfying,” she said. “I’ve had students who’ve surprised me because they may have seemed quiet or disengaged in class, but I later learned that they were absorbing everything and I was truly making a connection.”

Pollak said she loves the poet Mary Oliver. Some of her favorite writers include J.D. Salinger, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, John Irving, Ocean Vuong, Gary Shteyngart, Sally Rooney and Amor Towles.

“I truly appreciate a well-written sentence or an excellent description and become attached to characters in a novel I’m reading,” she said.

She did not know what she will be doing in retirement, but is getting certified in yoga and SEL or social, emotional learning.

She has been practicing yoga most of her adult life and may teach it to young people because, she said, she will miss teaching them. She did not know how she might use her SEL certification.

“I believe that social-emotional learning is an extremely important component of education that is often forgotten,” she said.

“I believe that the social-emotional piece is just as important as academics and that we need to help students become well-rounded, healthy and compassionate adults in order to thrive in the world. Sometimes I believe kids feel so much pressure to get A’s and get into a ‘top’ college that they are emotionally overwhelmed and burn out too early.

Social emotional learning can help students and their teachers to see the big picture and hopefully understand that there are more important things to focus on than just being ‘the best’ student to get into ‘the best’ school.”

Entering the last weeks of her high school stay, said what was interesting to her was that many of her colleagues are former students. She mentioned Matt Cannici, who teaches English in the room next door.

“It’s rewarding for me to see people come back and teach in this school.,” she said. “Hopefully, I played a part.”