Each year we write about local teachers who earn top marks for inspiring students as well as educating them. From a teacher who offers her home phone number to students struggling with schoolwork to another who practices tough love to foster independence, here are five educators who believe that learning doesn’t stop at the classroom door.
Caterina Earle
Middle school science teacher
Washington Episcopal School, Bethesda
Middle school teacher Caterina Earle finds that comics are good for more than laughs—they’re also effective teaching tools.
One of her favorites is a Non Sequitur strip in which preteen Danae Pyle believes she has finally stumped her sister, Kate, with the question: “If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?”
Yes, Kate responds, explaining that principles of physics prove that “sound waves exist regardless of anyone’s presence.” Danae stomps off, calling science a “metaphysical party pooper,” while Kate, always the voice of reason, says she prefers to think of it as the “designated driver.”
“That sounds like me!” says Earle, 55, pointing out Kate in the strip posted on a classroom wall that’s covered with other comics and news stories about biology, chemistry and physics. “Comics show that science really is everywhere.”
Earle’s enthusiasm for science hasn’t waned since she arrived at Washington Episcopal School in 1995 to create its first middle-school science program. The daughter of Italian biologists, Earle was born in Rome but grew up locally, attending Walt Whitman High School and Georgetown University, where she was a premed student and a lab instructor. She developed a passion for helping students draw conclusions from data, which led her away from studying medicine and into her first teaching job at Holton-Arms School in Bethesda in 1980.
Abstract concepts dominate the study of physics, but Earle makes them real for her eighth-graders through everyday examples. “That’s a beautiful interference pattern,” she tells them, pointing to a photo on the wall of a rainbow-colored oil slick on rainy asphalt. To illustrate how transverse and compressional waves differ, she pulls out a Slinky.
Jamie Durling, 22, of Chevy Chase, a former student and son of fifth-grade teacher Linda Durling, says Earle’s hands-on approach and fun personality motivated him. “It made you excited about coming to class and kept you engaged,” he says.
Earle believes that students get more out of moving around the classroom and performing experiments than they do listening to her lecture. “There really is this cool world out there,” she says. “You should never get bored because there’s always something to investigate.”
Christine Batky
Kindergarten teacher
Carderock Springs Elementary School, Bethesda
As a kindergarten teacher, Christine Batky’s job is to help young children find their footing while navigating a full day of learning away from home. It’s no small task, and one that Batky, with a singsong voice and nurturing disposition, embraces.
Each morning, students eagerly wait for her outside the classroom door. “They are always so excited when I greet them,” she says. “That’s the favorite part of my day.”
Batky, 26, believes kindergarten is a time when no milestone is too small to celebrate—even learning to count to 100. Her students count the first 100 school days as part of their daily ritual. On the 100th day, they each bring in 100 small objects of their choosing, write stories about what they would do with $100 and sing songs. “It’s a big day for them,” Batky explains.
It’s that understanding of her students that makes Batky so effective, Principal Rock Palmisano says. “Every day, the message she gives her students is…we have important things to do here, and I’m your partner in learning,” he says.
Potomac parent Sarah Graf says her children, Ryan, 7, and Emma, 6, thrived under Batky even though Ryan is reserved and Emma is an extrovert. “She does a great job of hooking kids into liking school,” Graf says. “She was such a great fit for both my children.”
Raised in Ellicott City, Batky became a kindergarten teacher at Carderock Springs in 2009 after graduating with a degree in early childhood education from Towson University. She earned her master’s in special education from Towson at the Universities at Shady Grove while teaching full time.
Pride of authorship is a lesson Batky teaches students early on. “All year long I refer to them as authors and illustrators,” she says. Students create their own books, and often read them to their parents during an Author’s Tea in May. “It makes them feel their work is important…[that] writing is exciting,” she says.
Graf, who attended the annual tea twice, says she marveled at the progress students had made during the school year. Batky “instills in them that sense of excitement and accomplishment,” she says.
Mary Jayne Bortz
Math teacher
Herbert Hoover Middle School, Potomac
Mary Jayne Bortz’s classroom resembles an art gallery more than a place where math is taught. Multicolored pencil drawings of geometrically-shaped monsters decorate one wall, and paper collages of lizards nestled tightly together in a “tessellation”—a pattern with no spaces between shapes that’s inspired by Dutch artist M.C. Escher—cover another.
All are works created by students who have turned algebra and geometry lessons into art. Bortz, 61, says such projects help her sixth- and seventh-grade students better learn the abstract concepts of middle-school math.
Take pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, roughly 3.14, a concept that students need to master before attempting geometry. Every March 14, Bortz celebrates “Pi Day” by asking students to bring in their favorite pies. Each student gets a pi symbol to decorate, and together they sing songs and read a story about Sir Cumference, Lady Di Ameter and their son, Radius.
The lesson teaches the concept of pi through art and storytelling instead of using “just paper and pencil, doing the formulas,” Bortz says. “It gives them a chance to visualize it [since] nobody wants to listen to me talk for 45 minutes.”
Bortz began teaching in 1975 and continued for five years before taking a break to raise her two children, now adults. She resumed teaching in 1988 and has been at Hoover since 1997.
Students appreciate Bortz’s personal touch, flocking to her 7 a.m. and lunchtime tutoring sessions. Bortz calls students at home to congratulate them if they’ve gone up a grade level on a quiz, and gives her home phone number to students struggling with their homework. She also inspires kids to help each other; eighth-graders tutor their younger peers in an after-school program she started 11 years ago.
“If you teach the students with respect, if you let them know you care,” Bortz says, “then they’ll do anything for you.”
Special education teacher Michelle Kennedy, who has taught math classes with Bortz for students of varying abilities, says Bortz is great at motivating kids. “She’s fantastic at making students feel responsible for their work and making sure they have what they need,” Kennedy says.
