Coming from congested Los Angeles, Elaine Winer says she has loved teaching and being a part of the Portola Valley community, where “everybody knows your name.”
“I’m going to miss the kids, seeing my friends on a regular basis, but I’m not going to miss the report cards, parent conferences and being sleep-deprived,” Ms. Winer says.
She retired June 30 after teaching in the Portola Valley School District for the past 34 years. Most of those years were spent teaching fourth grade.
Ms. Winer says that closing down her classroom was “a mind-boggling job.”
Over the years, she has collected a literary treasure of more than a thousand books, stashed on the cupboard shelves, and pounds of curriculum materials and reports. She plans to find new homes for the books with other teachers and pass on curriculum material to Denise Falzon, who’s returning to the fourth-grade classroom after teaching fifth grade.
Ms. Winer has also taken down from the wall the class pictures of every class she’s taught at both Corte Madera and Ormondale since she came to the district in 1972 as the youngest teacher on the staff.
She quickly became a key player in the district. She arrived with a “halo,” recalls colleague Eloise Fredrickson Pollock, because she did demonstration teaching for “the godmother of individualized instruction and the five-step lesson plan, Madeline Hunter,” at the University Elementary School on the UCLA campus.
During Ms. Winer’s internship at the university school, she team-taught grades three, four, and five, all at the same time in the same room. Her first parent conference concerned student Adam Nimoy, the son of Leonard Nimoy — Mr. Spock of “Star Trek” fame.
She taught for five years at a brand new school in Malibu where some students rode their horses to school and went surfing at lunch time. With a starting salary of $5,600, she became a member of the teachers’ bargaining team for the Santa Monica District.
After experiencing two Malibu fires and the 1971 earthquake, Ms. Winer decided to leave L.A. and return to the Bay Area, where she had studied at UC Berkeley before she returned to and graduated from UCLA.
Her first class at Ormondale was a challenging group of fifth-graders. They informed her that she would be there only for a year because every teacher they ever had had left after a year with them.
Undaunted, Ms. Winer not only survived that class but also several district reorganizations, eight new superintendents and the saga of revolving principals at Corte Madera.
She played a leadership role in the schools and district. She was a member of the steering committee that successfully passed the first tax override measure that marked the beginning of school districts’ having to supplement their budgets with community funds to preserve quality education.
A major accomplishment was serving on the teachers association’s first collective bargaining team, inaugurated by a new state law, that negotiated the first collective bargaining contract in San Mateo County. She headed the bargaining team in the 1980s that negotiated an unprecedented 29 percent salary boost for teachers, spread over three years.
Ms. Winer brought her early training in individualized instruction — tailoring instruction to the needs of children — to her classrooms at Ormondale and Corte Madera. Now, a similar approach is called “differentiated instruction,” geared to providing instruction that meets the needs and learning styles of groups of students.
“The school district has the reputation of being able to meet the needs of children with a vast array of abilities, needs and learning styles,” she says.
Ms. Winer has been a mentor teacher in the district, both officially and informally. She’s now the guru of the traditional fourth-grade Gold Rush field trip and initiator of the annual “Fantasy Tea,” when her students come as their favorite literary character.
Her love of children’s literature spurred her to bring high-quality book fairs to both schools and start the book donation program that has put more than 1,000 new books on the libraries’ shelves.
Dreams of having a children’s bookstore came true when she partnered with former librarian Ann Woodrow and Cherry Lyon in running “If Wishes Were Horses” in Palo Alto.
Her students have played a huge part in her life. Three stand out: a young surfer, Sean Penn; the mischievous Eric Byrnes, now playing center field for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who visited her class and told students to “listen to your teacher”; and a budding genius, Tom Woodrow, now executive producer shooting a film on location in Macedonia that might be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Ms. Winer plans to “not commit to anything for a year, just see what comes along.” She says she will “sleep late, stay up late, and subscribe to and read the New York Times.”
Her class has some other ideas for her, which were written and illustrated in her “happy retirement” book. Each page begins with, “I think Ms. Winer should travel to …” Students completed the sentence with suggestions including: the Borghese Gardens, to rent a motorized bike; Flagstaff, Arizona, to see a 9,000-year-old petroglyph and call the owner (phone number included); and the Mauna Lani Resort on the Big Island of Hawaii.
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