Teacher retires after 34 years at McCormick

In 1978, the head­line read: “Well grad returns as teacher.”

Now in 2012, 34 years later, Becky Nor­ton is retir­ing from teach­ing at McCormick Mid­dle School.

“I’ve been in the same room the whole time. Leav­ing will be hard. It’s like sell­ing your house after you’ve lived there for 30 or 40 years,” Nor­ton said.

Norton’s jour­ney began with her birth at a hos­pi­tal in Ober­lin, fol­lowed by grow­ing up on a farm in Brighton with brother David and two sis­ters, Mary and Jody. Nor­ton attended the Welling­ton schools, and in mid­dle school, started falling for her future hus­band, Craig Norton.

“I mar­ried my high school sweet­heart. We actu­ally started lik­ing each other in the eighth grade,” Nor­ton said.

In a vil­lage the size of Welling­ton, a home-town love can some­times put you into inter­est­ing scenarios.

“I had my boyfriend’s mom in school. She was my junior (year) Eng­lish teacher,” Nor­ton said.

Nor­ton grad­u­ated from Welling­ton High School in 1973 and attended Bowl­ing Green State Uni­ver­sity. Craig and Nor­ton kept together through­out col­lege despite a long-distance rela­tion­ship, as Craig went to Ohio State University.

In 1977, both Nor­ton and Craig grad­u­ated from their respec­tive col­leges and were mar­ried in Novem­ber at Brighton United Methodist Church in Welling­ton, where they still attend today.

Nor­ton, along with an ele­men­tary edu­ca­tion degree, has a master’s in administration.

Attend­ing BGSU made Nor­ton quite a hockey fan.

“Hockey is big at Bowl­ing Green. I love it. I would go to games there. I have a hockey stick in my room and one time a stu­dent brought me a Bowl­ing Green puck,” Nor­ton said.

Out of col­lege, Nor­ton landed a kinder­garten teach­ing posi­tion at Clearview, but the drive was too much with her home base still being in Wellington.

For the 1978-79 school year, Nor­ton found a local teach­ing job at McCormick Mid­dle School, and never left her room or building.

Dur­ing her tenure, Nor­ton has seen many changes through­out the teach­ing land­scape, none more pre­dom­i­nant than tech­nol­ogy and the Internet.

“We had old lights and radi­a­tors. I learned how to hand thread a movie pro­jec­tor in col­lege. Now it’s smart boards, ipads, com­put­ers,” Nor­ton said.

Norton’s co-workers have gone through the changes as well and stayed strong.

“The staff comes and stays, it really is a strength of the dis­trict. It is a big staff; I had a lot of the teach­ers in fifth grade,” Nor­ton said.

Spend­ing all of her years at McCormick, Nor­ton always hoped to see the facil­i­ties upgraded.

“It was always my goal to teach in a new build­ing. The kids and the staff deserve it. The build­ing is like an old Vic­to­rian home, a lot of his­tory, but it can’t sup­port the needs. Tech­nol­ogy is so much a part of what we do now (teach­ing), and McCormick can’t sup­port it,” Nor­ton said.

“My class was the first class at West­wood. Then ‘72/73 at the new high school. I still call it that, the new high school. But McCormick is so old. It’s dif­fi­cult to con­duct classes some­times when the kids are burned out from it being so hot in the build­ing,” Nor­ton said.

The McCormick build­ing is full of old mem­o­ries as well.

“It’s a small world, and now I’m hav­ing the chil­dren of the chil­dren I had in fifth grade. My mem­ory is full of all the great peo­ple I’ve worked with, it’s been a close staff that always helped each other out, more like fam­ily,” Nor­ton said.

Nor­ton gets reminded of her ser­vice when she is out about town.

“It’s great going places and kids will say, ‘Oh Mrs. Nor­ton, how are you?’ In a small town it’s great because you get to see the kids grow up. You’re always their teacher,” Nor­ton said.

Every teacher has an impact on a student’s life, a num­ber Nor­ton has tried to calculate.

“By 10 a.m., I’ve had around 200 inter­ac­tions with stu­dents. Kids want to share what they know,” Nor­ton said.

As for Norton’s plan for retire­ment, “My hus­band bought me a banjo,” Nor­ton said.

by ADAM FOX

Enter­prise reporter

Posted by Adam Fox on Jun 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.