Retiring teacher says being in the classroom was a "gift"

Looking back at a teaching career that began in 1973, retiring Midvale Elementary School instructionalMary Malloy is retiring after four decades in teaching (Rachel Schulze/Madison Commons resource teacher Mary Malloy recalled her first year as a teacher.

“I remember that at that point in time, it was my life,” Malloy said. “For most first-year teachers, teaching is their life. Generally, that first year, it’s every day, including weekends.”

Throughout her career, and especially in her role as an instructional resource teacher at Midvale, she has helped numerous rookie teachers through the transition process. After a career that spanned four decades, Malloy retired at the 2012-13 school year.

“She was probably that one person that we could always expect answers from,” said Angie Mortensen, who teaches first grade at Midvale. “I would describe her also as a wealth of resources because she just always had something for whatever we needed an answer to. I would just say she’s just so quick to recall her experiences and apply them to whatever experiences we were having at the time.

Malloy started as a special education teacher in the Hamilton-Sussex School District and Milwaukee Public Schools before coming to the Madison Metropolitan School District. After taking time off to raise four children, Malloy returned to teaching in 1994, working as a first grade teacher at Van Hise Elementary School then at Midvale before becoming an instructional resource teacher.

Malloy’s role as an instructional resource teacher involved aiding staff with professional development and working with students who needed extra help.

“From working with first graders to working the staff—the staff being very much my peers—that’s a big switch in role,” Malloy said.

While Malloy called it a “privilege” to work with the staff, she said that literacy and children’s books were her first curricular area of love.

She said she can’t pinpoint a one specific reason why she became a teacher but said her love of reading as well as being the second oldest of eight siblings might have contributed to her career choice. Her younger brother may have been her first successful student. When Malloy was 20, she took her 10-year-old brother out to dinner provided he read C.S. Lewis’ “The Magician’s Nephew.” He liked the book.

“From that point on, he too ended up loving reading,” Malloy said. 

As a children’s book fan, Malloy was happy about the ways children’s books are more abundant than when she was growing up. she suggested that this abundance, because it may not be equally available to all children, contributes to a widening skills gap among students.

“When I first started teaching, the range of what a child came with was far smaller than what a child might come with now,” Malloy said.

She added that, along with educating students from a widening range of backgrounds, schools are also expecting children to start reading at younger ages. Where in the past schools aimed to have children begin reading in first grade, Malloy said schools now want students to begin reading in kindergarten.

“What we’re expecting of kids is getting so much larger,” Malloy said.

While curricular expectations and students themselves have changed since Malloy first started teaching, Mortensen said Malloy has kept up with the times.

“She was always very experienced and able to share with us what she knew but also very up to date on anything that was new that we had questions about,” Mortensen said. “She truly was a resource and a wonderful person to work with…. I hope that I can do that for other teachers someday.”

While Malloy said with a laugh that her memory gets fuzzy when remembering specific dates in her career, she does not apply the generalization to her overall experience as a teacher.

“Every day in education, every day of teaching, is memorable,” Malloy said. “It’s a gift to have been a teacher.