My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

(fifth in an occasional series on BOOKS THAT MATTER & THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM)

Lorita Foster and I met late August 2003, when she interviewed for a position in my district’s English department.

It had been a chaotic summer. Our principal was out on an indefinite, health-related leave and my six-member department had been decimated. One teacher retired, one’s contract wasn’t renewed, one took a position closer to home, and one teacher out on medical announced she wouldn’t return–two weeks before school started. As the newly installed chair—a title more decorative than supervisory—I was expected to sit in on each round of interviews, a process complicated by the interim administrators’ lack of planning, organization, and communication. They rarely scheduled interviews in batches, or even with more than a day’s notice, and a few times we needed to restart the hiring process because our board–or a candidate–said no. 

((Sigh))

I was exhausted and frazzled and tired of cobbling care for my six- and eight-year-olds, who didn’t understand why our normal carefree summer had been upended. Tired of explaining to my husband why I had to work, even though I wasn’t being paid. Even though I wasn’t being reimbursed for tolls or gas or childcare, or given compensatory time. School would start in little over a week, and I still had curriculum to write, lessons to plan, classrooms to organize, new teachers to orient, my own children to back-to-school prep. Not to mention read a dozen or more books for AP Lit, which I’d never before taught and which had been added to my teaching load the day before this latest round of interviews. 

So I have to confess that I was not in the best of moods when Lorita arrived wearing an elegant periwinkle pantsuit and carrying a twelve-inch thick binder teeming with unit plans and credentials. 

I’m exaggerating its size, but not its contents. The woman clearly knew her sh*t. Clearly had herself way more together than I. 

Of course, you know what they say about books and their covers.

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For nearly twenty years, Lorita and I taught in across-the-hall classrooms, and I was right, she did know her sh*t. In fact, she was the kind of teacher I wished my own children could have had, yet she was no more ‘together’ than any of us are, meaning she’d worked many years and overcome many obstacles to create that persona facing us across the interview table.

As a child, she struggled to read even the simplest texts, baffled by her classmates’ magical ability to conjure sound and meaning from squiggles on the page, until she was fitted with trifocals in second grade. As a high school sophomore, she became pregnant and was kicked out of her Christian school for marrying her baby’s father. As a young adult, she divorced, earned her GED, and left her retail job for community college, then university and a career in education. “I was a single mom,” she explained. “And I needed something that would enable me to take care of us both.” At West Chester, she double-majored in her two loves, English and math, then focused on English after trying and failing to master Calculus II. 

After graduating, she taught several years at Philadelphia’s Girard College, developing curriculum for that binder I envied and a rapport with students and colleagues she hated to leave. However, she’d recently remarried and moved to New Jersey, and needed a manageable commute. She laughs about it now, but that ‘F’ on her transcript nearly cost her the job in my district, when a board member initially balked at the anomaly.

She shares those stories with her students because she wants them to understand she once sat on their side of the desk, worried and struggling and trying to navigate a future she could barely see let alone plan. Yet success–however each individual defines it–is achievable, she tells them. If they work at it, if they’re willing to learn from their mistakes and setbacks. If they prioritize their education and strive to be active readers.  

“Reading opens up your world,” she explained during our video chat earlier this year. “It gives you insight into times and places you’ve never lived. The more you read, the better a writer, communicator, and thinker you become. Reading really is fundamental to everything, not only your career, and I love finding books that students fall in love with.”

That philosophy informed her teaching practice. Long before differentiation became an educational buzzword, Lorita recognized that “not every story speaks to every child,” and not every child learns the same way, which is why students must have access to libraries with all kinds of writers and all kinds of books. Even in a formal classroom setting, students should be allowed a measure of choice in their reading, which explains why walking into her classroom was like walking into a library. Bookcases lined most of its wall space, their shelves crammed with hundreds of books she’d begged, borrowed, or bought with her own money, then loaned to her students. Sometimes for their own enjoyment, sometimes for her quarterly independent reading units, wherein her juniors (with parental or guardian approval) selected their own books to study. 

Each September, she asked students to evaluate their learning styles and preferences. Each June, she asked her students to evaluate their progress. What had worked best for them and why? Invariably, independent reading topped students’ lists of most valuable, favorite units. 

Which is why I developed and incorporated independent reading units within my own curriculum. 

*****

Unfortunately, the chaos of summer 2003 leaked into fall. 

The eleventh grade teacher whom Lorita had been hired to replace had taken with her every teacher resource, every edition, every key. Every unit plan and every bit of unit material and assessment a new hire should rightfully expect. Gone. Not even copies remained. Only dog-eared student paperbacks that teetered in haphazard piles on the floors and on top of student desks. 

My former colleague had even taken all the materials I would need, despite knowing I’d never taught AP Lit, despite knowing I’d be tasked with rebuilding our department. But she was angry with administration, angry with the direction it had begun to steer our district, and she’d retaliated, intending to send a message to our aforementioned principal. 

However, he never received it–Lorita and I did. And so would our students, if we didn’t quickly figure out what to do next. 

Thank goodness for Lorita’s binder. Thank goodness for Lorita. 

She challenged me to become a much better teacher than I could have otherwise been. 

Eventually, she and I became friends as well as colleagues, commiserating about work and life struggles, brainstorming lesson plans and student discipline, chatting about books and recommending authors. I told her about The Bean Trees, which she incorporated in her reading circles. She told me about The Kite Runner, which became one of my two all-time favorite books to teach. 

Back and forth across the hall we went, until Covid shut our doors in March 2020 and September 2020, she moved across the parking lot to head the district’s program for at-risk students, a much different teaching assignment than classroom instruction. The curriculum is prescribed and self-paced, the student cohort limited to twelve students from grades nine through twelve. Yet she excels as their instructor just as she did when a classroom teacher.

“I know you don’t miss grading essays,” I said. “But is there anything you do miss? Anything you wish you could teach again?”

“Independent reading,” she said, almost immediately. “So often students would come to me, after one of those units, and they’d be so proud of themselves. So amazed. ‘That’s the first book I’ve ever read cover to cover,’ they’d tell me. Can you imagine? Being sixteen, seventeen years old and never reading a whole book? That tells you something, doesn’t it? About what we’re teaching our kids? About what we should be teaching them?”

Throughout our nearly two hour conversation, she’d leaned forward eagerly, but now a weight shuttered her expression. Her arms knotted, her focus turned off-camera.

“There would be such a … hole … in my life, if I didn’t have books.”

**********

a few BOOKS THAT MATTER to Lorita Foster:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

While Lorita’s reading tastes used to skew toward realistic and historical fiction, now she’ll read almost any genre. “I may not like every book I read, and I may not finish every book I start, but I like learning new things and meeting new ‘people.’” Stories set in non-American cultures and containing multiple POV characters number among her favorites, and she admits to binging writers whom she particularly adores. These days, audiobooks are her preferred medium because she can listen while engaged in other hobbies and have-tos, and because they drown out noise from the television.

“Shhh,” she said, mock serious. “Don’t tell my husband.”

*****

Looking for more posts in this series?

You can find them HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

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Reading Challenge Update:

As of October 31, I’ve read 91 books toward my 2024 goal of 100, which Goodreads tells me is eight ahead of schedule. I recently finished  Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent and Salman Rushdie’s Victory City, and I’m waffling on what to pick from my TBR pile next. I should probably tackle Ahab’s Wife before it’s due back at the library next week, but I’m not sure I’m up for its 666 pages after also recently finishing Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword—which was a fun but long read at 673!! pages. 

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ICYMI, excited to share….

My short, short story ‘He Could Have Read Her Signs’ appears in a recent issue of Quail Bell Magazine. You can read it here.

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Coming up on MY NAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ELIZABETH ANN….

Next up in December, I’ll be revisiting a series on media literacy I began in 2021 (but never finished!!). You can read the first posts here and here.

And in January, highlights, insights, and book recommendations from my 2024 reading challenge, as well as reading goals for 2025.

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What are you reading now? And how do you pick from your TBR pile? Drop a comment below 🙂

PS–The picture above depicts my classroom reading nook, before I retired.

Thanks for reading!! Thanks for sharing!!