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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Teacher transition


Roosevelt Elementary second-grade teacher Joan Polzin sends her students off from a reading session to work on fairy tale projects last month. 
 (Christopher Anderson/ / The Spokesman-Review)

Joan Polzin has been a fixture at Roosevelt Elementary since she was a child, first as a student, then as a teacher there for 23 years. But now she’s retired and contemplating traveling in her motor home. “There are things I’m really going to miss,” she said. “It took me a month to get used to the idea.” There were several factors in her decision to retire. Polzin, 55, suffers from rheumatoid arthritis. Some days when she arrived home she would be so exhausted she couldn’t get off the couch. “This job takes a lot of energy,” she said.

Her mother is 91 and needs to be taken to doctor appointments and assisted in other ways.

“I know I don’t have the energy to do it all,” Polzin said. “My spirit still wants to do it. I don’t want them to carry me out on a stretcher.”

She’s been a teacher for 28 years. She spent her first year in Washougal, Wash., before getting married and moving to Spokane. After substitute-teaching for a time, she was hired at Lewis and Clark High School as an English teacher.

She quit working after becoming pregnant and stayed at home for two years. She returned to work after getting a divorce.

But when Polzin returned to the classroom, it was full of elementary students. She wanted more time to spend with her daughter and knew that as a high school English teacher she often corrected papers late into the night.

She student-taught at Mullan Road Elementary for six weeks to help her get into the swing of things.

“I have to admit, the first week I was in tears,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘What have I done?’ It was just cultural shock.”

After the first week, though, she was hooked. She found her way to Roosevelt, where she taught second grade in the same room her entire career there.

Marybeth Smith, who works as a volunteer coordinator for Spokane Public Schools, said Polzin taught her daughter and two sons.

“I loved the way that she approached lesson planning and lesson delivery,” Smith said. “All of her lessons were part of a big-picture theme.

“The kids felt like they were stepping into a story every time they stepped into the classroom.”

Her daughter, Emma, had Polzin first.

“She was really excited for the boys when they both got her,” Smith said. “The thing I think she (Polzin) was always best at was communicating her conviction that they could do whatever she was asking.

“They just never had any doubt about themselves as learners in her classroom.”

At one point Polzin had thoughts of leaving the classroom to become a principal. She had a master’s degree in education from Whitworth College, did a principal internship and received her administrative credentials. But in the end she couldn’t leave her second-graders.

“I think I’d be in trouble all the time,” she said. “They (principals) have to please downtown and please the staff. I think I’d go with the staff every time.”

One thing Polzin said she will miss is the field trips. She took her student to the Broadview Dairy, the Spokane Transit Authority bus barn, Manito Park and Snyder’s Bakery.

“The kids would get little hats, a loaf of bread,” Polzin said of the trips to Snyder’s. “They were just treated royally.”

In a way, her husband, Stuart, will also be retiring. They’ve been married for 19 years, and Stuart, who works as a contractor, would often be called to bring something Polzin forgot to school.

He’d knock on the classroom window by the street and pass the item through. He also corrected papers on occasion.

“Sometimes I think spouses need medals for being married to a teacher,” she said.

Even though her children are well past the second grade, Smith is still sorry to see Polzin leave the classroom.

“It’s going to be the end of an era,” Smith said.

But Polzin won’t be going far. She lives only a block from the school and plans to come back to Roosevelt to volunteer.

“There is such a need,” she said. “It will be strange to come back here and walk into this room and have it not be this room.”