BES first-grade teacher Sharon Lamar retires with friends, 'Life is good'

Editor’s note: This is part of a series the Bigfork Eagle is doing to highlight the careers of seven staff members retiring from the Bigfork School District at the end of the 2011-12 school year. The Eagle will run an article featuring a different retiring staff member each week.

After 35 years of teaching, 19 of which were spent at Bigfork, Bigfork Elementary School first-grade teacher Sharon Lamar has become close friends with her colleagues, and is retiring with three of them this year. Cathy Bach, Caroline Pitz, and Terry Gross also decided this would be their final year of teaching.

“It’s just the biggest kick to retire at the same time as my friends,” Lamar said. “It might be a little more scary if I were the only person retiring, but it’s just been so much fun to have my friends also retiring. Being able to joke and make light of it, life is good.”

Bach and Lamar said the group plans to keep in close contact and visit each other frequently once the school year ends and their retirement begins.

“She is a wonderful teacher, I’m just thrilled to death that she has my grandson (in her class),” Bach said. “He’s off to a great start because of her teaching.”

Lamar graduated from Eastern Illinois University and then earned her Masters in Education with a focus on reading from Murray State in Kentucky. Before moving to Bigfork, she taught at Rosiclare High School in Illinois. Then she taught a mixed third- through fifth-grade class at Swan Valley School for 12 years. She also taught at Hellgate High School for two years.

Lamar has taught every grade level from pre-school to college, but feels that her niche is in first-grade.

While working individually with her students on flowers for Mother’s Day last week, Lamar bounced back and forth from that project to giving support or just chatting with students that came to her with everything from completed projects to endearing stories. The rest of her class did “rocket math,” while some worked on the computers and others worked on different projects.

Lamar calls first-grade a year for “phenomenal growth.” As the end of the school year approaches, her students are doing things they couldn’t when they first entered her room in the fall.

“There’s never a dull moment, there’s always something going on and I never get bored,” Lamar said. “It keeps me on my toes, it keeps me young. Their energy is great and they are motivated at this age.”

In addition to teaching full-time, Lamar is an avid painter and also wrote and illustrated a children’s book, “Mountain Wild Flowers for Young Explorers.” After retiring she plans on doing a similar book about mountain butterflies.

Over the years she’s seen different approaches to teaching phase in and out. Everything from open classrooms, that is a school with no walls separating one class from another, to the individualized learning phase and finally high-stakes testing.

One of the many highlights from her career happened just last year when her previous student, Travis Lopes, came to visit as he was preparing to graduate from Columbia Falls High School.

“It just almost took my breath away that he would come and visit his first-grade teacher,” Lamar said. “He told me ‘you helped me a great deal,’ you don’t realize at the time that you have that impact.”

With Lamar’s guidance her students progress from spelling words to forming entire sentences, from recognizing numbers to doing math problems and writing number scrolls which list numbers for as far as her students want to go. One student enjoyed writing number scrolls so much last year that he wrote all the way to 10,600 by hand.

“It’s easier to do something like retiring when you’re feeling good about what you do,” Lamar said. “I forget how Terry Gross worded it…’we’re going out in a blaze of glory.’”