This year, Ridgefield Academy welcomed 7th and 8th grade Language Arts teacher, Christine Hruska to its faculty and staff rolls. A Connecticut native, Mrs. Hruska was an avid reader as a child. “My favorite thing to do as a kid was to go to the library on Saturday to get books for the week,” recalls Mrs. Hruska. “I also loved to take my books outside to read.” On many weekends, Christine and Nancy Drew teamed up for lots of adventures together in the great outdoors.
In addition to mysteries, Mrs. Hruska enjoys Shakespeare. “My love for Shakespeare started early,” recollects Christine Hruska. “My mother had a Yale Shakspeare book collection—a series of little blue books--on her bedside table. “Ever since I can remember I wanted to read the little blue books.” And read them she did. Mrs. Hruska notes that you can read them over and over and pick up something new each time--a joke, an innuendo, a new message, etc.
Christine shares her love for Shakespeare in the classroom. The seventh grade recently finished the study of the tragic play, Romeo and Juliet, while the eighth grade completed a unit on the Shakespeare comedy, Much Ado About Nothing. The students read the respective play, watched a movie-version performance and wrote a paper on a specific aspect of it. “I love Shakespeare,” admits Mrs. Hruska. “It is so rich.”
When you love to read, the obvious career choices include writer, teacher and detective. (No, that was not a typo.) Besides teaching, Mrs. Hruska considered a career as a police detective (minus the gun). “I love puzzles--figuring things out and mysteries,” explains Mrs. Hruska.
These same features are what drew Christine to literature--revealing the author’s true message from word choices, character development and literary techniques. While the only chalk lines in Mrs. Hruska’s class are on the blackboard, you do see her sharing her problem-solving enthusiasm and analysis techniques with her students as class lessons.
With prior teaching experience in high school, how did Mrs. Hruska end up in a Middle School program? “I noticed that many students coming into high school were not well prepared for the challenge of secondary school. Someone had suggested I do something about it or be quiet,” recalls Christine Hruska. Soon after, an opportunity opened up to teach a seventh grade language arts class and Christine took it.
“It was a breath of fresh air. I was working with kids who weren’t affected by the social aspects of high school life. They were willing to learn and very curious. I found that very exciting,” admits Mrs. Hruska
The move was not without its challenges. There were a number of opportunities to improve middle school language arts skills and fill in “gaps” in knowledge areas. Ever the problem-solver/detective, Mrs. Hruska determined what was needed and set about improving the 7th grade and 8th grade curricula so that they fit together, then dovetailed it to the needs at the high school level, so that the students were better prepared in secondary school and beyond. The combination of previous high school teaching experience and the oversight for both 7th and 8th grade language arts programs made it easy for the sleuth to diagnose and remedy the program.
The results were positive for everyone. The feedback from high school teachers was great; they noticed a significant improvement in Freshman writing and basic skills. For Mrs. Hruska, she found the middle school students were easy to engage and curious.
“I feel like what I’m doing is important and necessary and I take it personally. I want these [middle school] kids to feel comfortable when they get to high school,” Christine adds.
“One of the best rewards I’ve gotten is from kids coming back to thank me when they started 9th grade they didn’t have any problems with their first essays or research papers.”
“I felt like I gave them the tools and confidence to hit the ground running when they got to high school.”
Since coming to RA, Mrs. Hruska initiated the school’s first annual Middle School Poetry Contest. “I thought the contest could be a good way to promote poetry and get kids involved in it,” indicates Mrs. Hurska.
Introduced in April, National Poetry Month, the contest has multiple categories for submissions and winners will receive a prize. The categories include: Best Short Poem (a poem of 16 lines or less), Best Long Poem, Best Poem Overall and Poet Laureate. Entries have been received and the winner will be announced in early May.
“What keeps this job fresh for me is the daily interaction with the students. You never know what is going to happen on any given day. Also, I learn something from my students ever year--I live for those moments.”
“When the kids have those, “Ah-ha” moments, where something clicks for them and they understand something you have taught, that’s exciting for a teacher,” reports Mrs. Hruska. “But even more exciting for me is when the students point out something that I have never thought of before. It is humbling.”
Christine Hruska has an Associate of Arts Degree from Hartford College for Women, a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Connecticut and a Masters Degree in Teaching from Teachers’ College at Columbia University.
Prior to joining Ridgefield Academy Mrs. Hruska held teaching positions in a broad range of grades and academic environments. For instance, Christine conducted her student teaching at Stuyvesant High School, a specialized public high school for math, science and technology. She also taught English at the High School for Graphic Communication Arts a public vocational school in Manhattan for the print trade; Fox Lane High School, a public school in Bedford, NY; The Masters School an independent boarding and day for grades 5 to12 in Dobbs Ferry, New York; and The Wooster School, an independent day school for grades K-12 in Danbury.
Of all of her teaching experiences, one of the most rewarding for Mrs. Hruska was working at the High School for Graphic Communication Arts in New York City. The class sizes at the school were large--35 students (a senior honors class had 20). “So many people told me that the kids were underperformers that were not ‘teachable,’” she explains. “Stubbornly, I thought, ‘I’ll prove them wrong.’”
And she did. Christine was hired temporarily to fill in for the English teacher from February until the end of the school year. “In one of my junior classes, 60 percent of the students were failing when I got there. I was able to reduce that number by half in three months.”
“The biggest challenge was trying to get the students to trust me and to invest the time in the class. Some students came around quickly, some came around over a period of time, but the important thing is they did come around,” adds Mrs. Hruska.
Christine is married to Derek Hruska and has three children, John, a junior at Danbury High School, Chris, a freshman at The Wooster School and Luke, a Foundation student at RA. “In our family of five, we represent four schools,” notes Mrs. Hruska. (Derek Hruska teaches science, specifically physics, and this summer a class in forensics, at Brunswick School.) The newest member of the Hruska family, a year-and-a- half old, yellow Labrador mix named Bear, is from the “school of hard knocks.” The Hruska’s adopted Bear from an animal rescue shelter in Memphis, Tennessee. Believed to be a failed hunting dog, Bear had been abandoned and starving and in need of a good home. He now keeps the Hruska’s busy outdoors.
When not on the road to various sporting practices and games, the family enjoys spending time together with a movie, enjoying music or playing street hockey together—true poetry in motion!