So what better way to recognize the start of a new school year than to recognize the teacher with the most number of years in the district?
And after 39 years, that would be Lisa Walter, the peripatetic reading language specialist at Forest and Linden Avenue schools.
When first hired, Walter started at Linden Avenue as a first-grade teacher, a job she held for 10 years. She then moved to Forest and Linden schools as a reading specialist and did this for two years. Next, she became a first-grade teacher at Forest and is now the reading specialist for both schools.
”When I graduated college, I was a teacher/missionary teacher in Japan for that summer and lived with a pastor and his family,” she said. “Meanwhile, my mother was sending out my resumes.”
She attended Grove City College, north of Pittsburgh. It is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. After a visit to the campus, as a high-schooler, she knew the campus was right for her. Walter is a graduate of Bloomfield High School, class of 1982.
“I could see myself there,” she said. “I remember sitting in the car with my mother and telling her it was right for me. I had a great experience there.”
Perhaps a small school which many people had not heard of, but every once in a while Walter meets someone who attended the school and still keeps in touch with classmates. Walter received her masters from Montclair State University.
“It’s complicated teaching a child to read,” she said. “First thing, we’re wired to speak, we’re not wired to read.”
Reading starts with listening, she said.
“For example, what are the sounds in the word ‘cat’?” she said. “Then connect that to a graphic representation, a picture of a cat. Then say the sounds and write the letter. Some of the things go simultaneously and there are tests to determine where the reading is breaking down.”
Walter’s mother was a pre-school teacher. This influenced her decision to become one herself, but she always loved reading and recalled being with a college friend watching a TV news report about orphans having to leave their orphanage.
“Something happened to it,” Walter said, not remembering exactly what.
She saw senior citizens, on TV, teaching the children to read.
“I started sobbing,” she said. “My friend always tells this story. But, for me, seeing a kid’s face when they can read something is a wonderful thing.”
Walter has her go-to books. “Charlotte’s Web,” the E.B. White, the 1952 classic is one.
“The vocabulary is a little more difficult, but kids pick up on language,” she said.
“Winne-the-Pooh,” the 1926 children’s-book-turned-franchise, by A.A. Milne, is another. Walter said her pupils spontaneously will take a phrase from a book and make it into classroom slang.
“Kids pick up on language,” she said.
There has been a shift in the teaching of reading over the last 10 years, she said, a necessity because its teaching had been infiltrated by incorrect methods. What brought it up-to-date was the development of the science of reading which addressed how the brain works. Previously, reading had been taught by associating words with pictures. This was called balanced literacy. New schooling believes reading should be tied to phonetics,
“There’s a war going on,” she said. “Some teachers still believe in balanced literacy and some children will learn that way.”
What changed Walter’s mind was exposure to the Orton-Gillingham Method of teaching reading. She took a two-year training course at Fairleigh Dickinson University to study it.
“It’s funny,” she said. “When I started college, I wasn’t an education major. I didn’t want people to think I was copying my mother. It’s ridiculous. I was a communications major. I wanted to be a reporter.”
She thought being a reading teacher came easily to her because she always loved reading.
“But the first year of teaching in Glen Ridge, I went home and cried every day,”: she confessed. “It was tough to learn classroom management. It’s no small thing.”
One problem she had was when a first-grade boy proposed marriage.
“It was tough,” she said. “How do I let him down?”
But the boy let her off the hook when he said he could not see himself coming home and saying, “Honey, I’m home.”
Another time a little girl wrote her a note telling her that her parents were being divorced. Walter, whose own parents were divorced, told the girl that her parents were divorced, too, but they both love you so much.
“You will get through this,” she told the girl, “and if you want to keep writing to me, that will be OK.”
The girl did not write anymore, but her mother came to thank her. Walter told the mother that she was glad the girl could write that to her. And after 39 years?
“I still love teaching,” she said. “It has its days.”
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