By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Linda Weber parks in the same spot each morning outside Cranbury School, where she is a fifth-grade teacher.
She arrives by 7:30 a.m. and leaves well past the time that the school day has ended and her some 23 pupils have gone home.
“Teaching’s a calling,” she said. “It’s not a job, it’s never been a job, because if it was, I’d be doing something else maybe.”
Recognized as the 2017 Teacher of the Year by the school district, she has been a professional educator since 1998 in what was a mid-life career change that started with her going back to college as an older woman.
“It made me come alive, it really did. It was a tremendous, exciting time in my life going to school,” she said. “I think I always was a teacher. Always.”
Seated at a table in her classroom on a recent Wednesday afternoon, she discussed her life and career path, her work in Cranbury and that “bittersweet” moment of seeing her students leave at the end of the school year.
“I think if you’re in this job, you have to know that everything changes, every year, with them,” she said of her students. “Every group you have, every group of kids, is different.”
“I do not lower the bar for anybody,” she said later. “But everybody’s bar is in a different area, because I want to see growth, individually, for children. And that has always been pretty much who I’m about.”
She seeks to connect with her students, interested in their lives in and out of school. They can laugh together and cry together. As a mom, she can understand what it is like to be on the other side of parent-teacher conferences.
“I always have to put myself in their chair first …,” she said.
For Weber, she grew up in Freehold in a small family of four, with her parents and a sister. She had more than a taste of rural life in New Jersey, as her paternal grandparents were chicken farmers who also grew produce.
“So as a kid, I learned to grow my vegetables and sell them in a stand,” she recalled. “My father thought it was really good to be able to learn how to talk to people and how to make change, how to weigh things and use scales. And he often would just let me do it and just sit back and watch.”
In looking back, she sees the experience as being formative.
After high school, she tried community college and juggled working a civilian job in the Freehold Police Department.
“But I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to waste money doing that,” she said.
She worked for the township, eventually moving to the tax assessor’s office, before landing a job with McGraw-Hill, in Hightstown. She later transferred to the publishing company’s Sixth Avenue office in midtown Manhattan starting in 1977. Other jobs would follow, until she decided to go back to school by taking a course at a time at Brookdale Community College, in Monmouth County. Married with children, she incrementally increased her course load, graduated and enrolled in Georgian Court University, a Catholic college in Lakewood, in 1995.
“I love learning, I love learning,” she said for emphasis, “because, somehow in my mind, I didn’t think I learned enough.”
After college, she was hired at St. Benedict School, in Holmdel, to teach sixth-graders starting in September 1998. “The people in the school were very supportive,” she said.
But a friend who taught in Cranbury told her of an opening, so she applied and got the job, although it meant going from teaching middle school-age children.
Of Cranbury School, she points to the collaboration among teachers.
“This is a sharing school, everybody shares ideas with each other,” she said. “We go and pick books off each other’s shelves to see if something could help us.”
Of her students, she found that she learns something from them every day. “They teach me constantly,” she said.
This month, though, it will come time to part with them, as they move to the sixth grade. It’s enough to make the teacher, known for being firm, cry.
“We call ourselves the little Weber team, we’re a team here. And we care about each other,” she said. “And I think when they leave, it’s really bittersweet at that point … .”
