By Ellie Brogan
Wayland Post Intern
Multiple teachers, administrators, and staff will be retiring from Wayland Public Schools at the end of the 2024-25 school year, among them four teachers from Happy Hollow Elementary School. Deirdre Bergeron, Gretchen Ryder Sharry, Michelle Lataille and Christine McAuley reminisced about their teaching experiences throughout their long careers.
The four teachers met together to discuss what motivated them to continue teaching throughout their long careers and comment on how the curriculum changed. Their passion for teaching was palpable, with all of them adding onto each other’s enthusiasm and memories. McAuley said her motivation was “The smile on the child’s face when they get an answer. They just light up and you say, ‘You’re right!’ and they get this biggest smile on their faces. That’s what keeps me going.”
“Having things like Roller Coaster Day or tapping the maple tree like we do every year — and I know how excited kids get — it’s really fun for me. It’s like I’m giving them a present: ‘Oh, they’re going to be so happy when they do this’.” said Bergeron, whose classroom had numerous annual traditions that lasted for decades.
But the teachers also spoke of their teaching challenges throughout the years, and the increasing rigidity of teaching curriculum in the modern day. “It used to be that we taught in thematic units, so we were still teaching the same skills, but they weren’t coming out of like, ‘Here’s your phonics program and here’s your reading program and here’s your math program’,” Bergeron said. “Now things are a little more chopped up, like the phonics program may have no connection to the math or the reading.”
The curriculum structure isn’t the only thing that has changed. “The curriculum is ramped up like two grade levels from what it had been when we first started. It used to be that kindergarten was a big time to learn how to interact with other kids and negotiate playing a game. I’m teaching that in a lot of my sessions now with kids, because they don’t know how to do that.” McAuley said.
“I hope they felt that I cared about them,” Ryder Sherry said. “And I tried to make the things I was teaching them, the things that were hard for them to learn, fun.”
“I hope they remember that I believed in them — that even though this may be hard, that I believe that you can do it, that you can get there — that they felt heard, felt, seen,” Lataille said.
When asked what advice they would give to future teachers, Ryder Sherry advised them to “be flexible, to enjoy the students for who they are, to have parameters.” According to Bergeron, “If you build the relationship and community in your classroom, the other stuff will follow.”
Each teacher shared different memories of helping children, ranging from how Lataille ended up with a classroom guinea pig to Bergeron having a child finally understand grammar after struggling.
Bergeron taught kindergarten and first grade for 34 years of her 42-year career. She worked as a researcher for two years at Boston Children’s Hospital before Wayland hired her as an Inclusion Specialist at Wayland Middle School. The Inclusion program helps teachers integrate students with uncommon disabilities. After two years, she switched to first grade because she missed classroom teaching. Bergeron, who lives in Natick, has no children but owns two Siberian cats, Elton and Mitzy. During her retirement, she hopes to travel, undergo cochlear implant surgery, and substitute teach at Happy Hollow.
Ryder Sharry taught kindergarten through fifth grade for nearly 28 of her 37 years in the classroom. She has lived in Wayland for 34 years and started working at Happy Hollow when her youngest child was in kindergarten, working as a substitute teacher before she was hired as a teaching assistant and later as a special education teacher. All three of her children (now in their 30s) attended Wayland Public Schools. She’s unsure what retirement will bring, but guesses that it will involve volunteer work and helping care for a grandchild.
Lataille taught elementary special education for 27 years out of a total of 25. The Stow resident started working at Wayland Public Schools because it felt like the right fit for her. She has no children but has “some very spoiled pets,” she said. She imagines that retirement will include activities like beading, silversmithing, and other creative pursuits, as well as activities that combine these pursuits with animals, nature, and children.
McAuley, a speech language pathologist at Happy Hollow for 10 years, teaching in Wayland for 26 years of her career spanning more than 40 years. She lives in Wayland and has two children (31 and 27). She hopes to travel during “non-school vacation times,” read and garden more, and maybe start golfing.
