It’s a Friday in April and fourth grade teacher Sue Rota is wearing a pair of pink sequined Minnie Mouse ears. Why? For Rota, the mere fact that it’s a Friday in April is reason enough to wear mouse ears. Or really any day of the week, since what started as a holiday fashion statement has now become a staple of Rota’s daily wardrobe.
Her selection of cranium couture began when students went remote during the pandemic. “The kids were home, I was home and I thought ‘How am I going to keep them engaged?’ she recalls. “I just started picking up headbands and I would put them on. When we came back to school in person and I didn’t have one on, it was like ‘Mrs. Rota, Where is your headband?!’ So now I need to wear a headband every day!”
Which is why two plastic bins filled to the brim with headbands in all sorts of shapes, sizes and themes have now taken up permanent residence in her classroom.
The headbands are just one of the many ways Rota, who has been with the district for 11 years, sparks her student’s interest. Engagement and entertainment are the words she keeps coming back to; two things she feels are important to “help with the learning process,” because “nobody wants to hear me drone on all day.”
Look no further than her annual lesson on inference. Each December, Rota transforms her classroom into a whodunit crime scene. Led by the Tuxedo and Greenwood Lake police departments, students comb the room for evidence while learning a valuable lesson on making assumptions or accusations without facts. The same second-floor room serves as a construction site later in the school year. Donning hard hats and aprons, the fourth graders calculate the area and perimeter of several shapes taped off by Rota. “Anything we can do to put what they’ve learned in their hands to figure out in the real world,” she says.
Notice her use of the word “we.” Rota and her colleague, Stephanie Bock, teach in GGM’s lone departmentalized classroom. Students start each day with one of the two teachers and then flip midday.
“I enjoy it very much because it gives us a chance to work on something that we might specialize in and drill it down a little. It also benefits the student because we both say things like, ‘Hey, keep an eye on this’ or 'I noticed something,’” Rota says.
Bock echoes those sentiments, calling it a “joy” to work with Rota due to her energy, positive mindset and yes, her headbands.
“She is always researching new teaching ideas and projects and is always eager and willing to try anything that I find or present. Getting to work with Sue each day is a joy, and she helps me continue to grow as a teacher.”
This collaborative attitude stretches beyond the fourth-grade corner of the building. Rota says she often reaches out to her fellow teachers and instructors to consider what is happening in her classroom.
"I go to Ms. Klimowich and say, ‘You know, we’re doing something in ELA, can you tie it to STEM?’ Without a doubt, we have each other’s backs here.”
This bond she shares with the GGM faculty tops the list of things Rota loves most about a district she calls “special.” “You know we are a team. We really are a team. In every sense of the word.”
It’s the same word Bock used when discussing the fourth grade set up. “Sue is the first to check in each morning to make sure that as a team we are ready for the day. When I think about working side by side with Sue, she says it best, “We are livin’ the dream!”
Speaking of teams, Rota is a proud Mets and Cowboys fan, and uses sports to go “beyond the book and classroom.” (Especially the Cowboys part. “We have a lot of Giants fans in here,” she jokes.) For example, to explain perspective, she will use a controversial football play like the Cowboy’s 2014 “non-catch” in Green Bay, which still has her bitter. “So, to get the kids to understand perspective, I will say ‘that was a catch from my perspective, but not from the officials.’”
With every answer given or question considered, Rota launches into an animated response, making it obvious she unabashedly loves being a teacher.
“Oh, I do. Because no two days, no two periods are the same. You just do not know where it is going to go,” she says.
She then brings it right back to the students.
“I do not ever want them to stop learning. Just because you may be done with school at some point, it doesn’t mean you stop learning, and I want them to understand that,” she says.
“I tell them I learned just as much from them as they learned from me.”
So, what does she hope that students would say about their time in her classroom? The answer is quick and simple: “Just that we had a good time while we learned.”