(Photo by Valeria Araujo)

By Valeria Araujo – Staff Reporter

After 39 years of teaching, Mrs. Reshenk is retiring.

Reshenk said she will end her career with fond memories and longtime friendships.

“My best memories are actually when I am out of school,” said Reshenk, “and I run into people that I taught and they remember my class and really enjoyed taking the class and doing the work.”

Although Reshenk is retiring, she will return to Law in the fall to work in the library for the first three weeks of school.

In her early years of teaching, Reshenk said she was very stressed because of how big the classes were back in the 1980s. That stress caused her to find some neat ways to calm down.

“I would come home and eat a 12 oounce bag of Doritos and turn on the Muppets and Mr. Rogers and I would calm down and that is the only way I got through the first five years of teaching,” Reshenk said. “But then I discovered running.”

Reshenk had very interesting ways of giving detention in her many years of teaching at Law.

“I used to make students run the track with me for detention,” Reshenk said. “I could be out there for hours with kids doing make-ups on the track and it was good.”

Running wasn’t Reshenk’s only creative detention.

“I would make students wave goodbye to students leaving on school buses, and also I made kids sing Christmas carols to students going onto the school bus if they were talking in class,” Reshenk said.

Dante Hayden, a former student of Reshenk’s who is now a special education paraprofessional at Law, said his fondest memory of Reshenk was when she found a student cheating on a poetry test and made a grand deal of it to the delight of the class.

“I had a really good class; I had some really good friends in there and Reshenk being Reshenk made the class interesting,” Hayden said.

Law principal Mr. Thompson said that his fondest memory of Reshenk came when he first took over as principal.

“This woman comes in like the Tazmanian Devil, she looks at me and I’m like ‘Hi, how are you, I’m Fran Thompson!’ and she says ‘What do you think about grammar?’ and then she was gone,” Thompson said. “Four years later, there is nobody who better represents what teaching is all about than Mrs. Reshenk.”

Law history teacher Mr. Evanko has many fond memories of Reshenk.

“She’s a very honest person,” said Evanko. “She always tells you how she feels, she’s committed, and she cares about this building, the students and the faculty.  There is nobody who represents law more than Reshenk.”

Reshenk has taught many students in her 39 years and has given them not only English lessons, but life lessons as well.

“She still corrects my grammar to this day,” Hayden said. “She’s also taught me the life lesson to appreciate the little things.”

Members of the English department said that is going to be very strange not having Reshenk in Room 202 next year.

“Mrs. Reshenk is everything that is right about teaching,” English teacher Mr. Kulenych said. “She is Law. She’s a legend and she will be impossible to replace.”