Teaching comes full circle for Reinhardt

 

 North Fayette Valley family and consumer science teacher Shirleen Reinhardt helps seventh-grader Korbin Yauk with threading a needle in class. The teacher is taking early retirement after a 34-year career in the profession.

 

Teaching comes full circle for Reinhardt

 

 

By Chris Deback
cdeback@thefayettecountyunion.com

 

 

Teaching has come full circle for North Fayette Valley Middle School teacher Shirleen Reinhardt.

She got into teaching hoping to one day be a family and consumer science teacher, and now she will end her career teaching that subject to seventh-graders.

The 1977 Postville High School graduate was born to the late Mervin and Elva Mae Larson and lived on a farm north of Gunder. She attended the University of Northern Iowa, where she earned her bachelor's degree in elementary education in 1981 and her master’s degree in reading and language arts in 1992. 

To say that her career has taken twists and turns is quite an understatement. It started when she substituted the final semester of the 1981-1982 school year for various schools in northeast Iowa. 

“My first subbing job was at what is now MFL/MarMac; it was for biology, and we were dissecting earthworms that day,” Reinhardt recalled. “I had done that one other time when I was in high school biology, and I thought after that first day, ‘If I can do that, I can probably do just about everything.’ I have prided myself on being pretty flexible.” 

Her flexibility came in handy during her first full-time teaching job in Malvern near the Nebraska border. There, she taught all subjects to a combined fifth- and sixth-grade classroom. As a first year teacher, Reinhardt accepted the unique challenge of preparing two different lessons in each subject for one class. She remembers her first paycheck was $700 a month. 

“I taught reading to sixth-graders, then gave them some kind of seatwork, then taught reading to fifth-graders, and then I taught science, social studies and math,” she explained. “I had every single subject, but I was required by the Malvern school board to teach separate lessons to them. It was a zoo and quite a way to start.” 

Although Reinhardt enjoyed her time in the western part of the state, it just wasn’t the same as home. After the first year, she returned to northeast Iowa, taking a position with Starmont Community School District. She spent six years at Starmont, during which she married her husband, Michael, in 1985. 

The couple moved to a farm just south of Gunder and had two children, Jesse and Josie. While at Starmont, Shirleen taught English/language arts to sixth- through eighth-graders. She was even Teacher of the Year at Starmont, but she couldn’t recall the exact year she won the award. She noted that Starmont was a great fit for her, a place where she could grow professionally. While Starmont wasn’t all too far from her home, when the opportunity presented itself to get a little closer, she left the school for Valley.

“Valley at that time was gaining quite a reputation for being progressive,” Reinhardt said. “We had what I thought was a really strong principal at the time. He started a lot of things that were kind of cutting-edge. Starmont was probably the best situation you could expect, and I loved where I was at Starmont, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to teach at Valley.”

She started teaching fourth-graders reading and science in the Larrabee Building in Clermont. A year later, she moved into the new school in Elgin. After a couple years, Reinhardt began teaching reading, language arts and social studies instead of reading and science. After that, she was assigned to the Valley Elementary library, where she was a librarian for a number of years. While the school's librarian, administrators asked her to take on a reading assignment. The next year, she was teaching two reading classes. Eventually, she was back full-time in the classroom as the reading and language arts teacher at the middle school/high school.  

Her job duties changed once again when whole-grade sharing with North Fayette came about during the 2013-2014 school year. She now teaches reading and language arts to seventh-graders. While some were worried about the prospect of whole-grade sharing, Reinhardt welcomed the challenge. She sees challenges as an opportunity to expand one's comfort zone.

Technology has been one of those challenges. A lot has changed since the mother of two was a senior at Postville High School in 1977. She distinctly remembers there being one computer that was about as big as a fridge in the school. However, unless you were considered one of the super-smart kids, you didn’t dare touch it. 

She recalls rushing to use one of the few electronic typewriters each classroom had. When she got to college, the UNI graduate said it was a thrill to get her first self-correcting typewriter. Since then, technology in the classroom has taken off. 

“I don’t remember ever seeing a computer at my first job,” the former Clayton County Pork Queen said. “Then, it was just like this explosion of technology. The next year I was at Starmont, and there was, like, one computer shared by four rooms, and then the next year there was a computer lab shared by a whole school. Then, five years later we had four to five computers sitting in our room, and four or five years after that every kid had their own computer. 

“I have always prided myself on going with the flow, not that I didn’t have questions along the way because you have to learn, but now if you tried to get me to teach without laptops, it is almost impossible,” she added. 

While Reinhardt has changed schools and technology has changed along the way, one thing has remained constant with her career: the children. For Reinhardt, teaching is truly a passion, not just a job. She doesn’t mind the daily grind a teacher faces and the ever-changing curriculum because of her opportunity to mold minds. 

She closed with a funny story about a student she had in Malvern. 

“The first year I taught, one day I was giving a study guide to a student before we were watching a film,” the 34-year veteran teacher said with a smile. “I had laid out the papers on their tables and this one student came up to me just as sincere as ever and he said, ‘Mrs. Larson, my paper is blank.’ I remember saying, ‘Davey, turn it over.’ He turned it over and he said, ‘Oh, there it is.’ I just remember thinking, ‘You know it is so good when you can solve problems that easily.’”

 

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