marilyn zook

Teacher Shares Her Love of Learning with Third-Grade Flock

By Gretchen R. Crowe
HERALD Staff Writer
(From the Issue of 5/10/07)

Her classroom is awash in color, from the deep blue lockers to the multitoned Betta fish to the 14-year-old “bubble gum machine” — a classroom staple piled high with names of books that her third-graders have conquered throughout the year.
Marilyn Zook is the only third-grade teacher that St. Andrew the Apostle School in Clifton has ever known, and she is proud of the small habitat that she has spent the last decade and a half creating for her students.
“It’s just a comfortable place to be,” Zook said last week after her charges had shuffled off to computer class. “I love my kids. I love my little room. I do love what I do.”
The third-graders have branded this place of comfort as their own. Hand-crafted penguins with outstretched arms and open beaks sit nestled in between patches of ice and snow on top of the lockers. Student reports on inventions and saints hang in collages of accomplishment on the walls. Cut-up candies make up Braille letters that the students used to spell out their names.
Third grade is a special year filled with developmental milestones, Zook said.
“They’ve been learning to read, and now we begin reading to learn,” she said. “That’s really exciting. They come in so young and so eager and they are so ready to absorb everything.”
A native Virginian, Zook was born in Front Royal, received a degree in elementary education from Radford University and married her husband Jim at St. John the Baptist Church, the parish in which she grew up. Before the birth of her two children, Leslie and Patrick, Zook taught third grade at a public school in Alexandria. When her children were born, Zook put her career on hold and assumed the role of stay-at-home mom. When Leslie and Patrick approached college age, Zook returned to the classroom — this time to one that was faith-based.
“I could have taught in public school,” she said, “but my faith just meant an awful lot to me. It means so much to be able to share it with them.”
Along with cursive handwriting and long division, faith and prayer play directly into the third-grade curriculum at St. Andrew. The children pray a decade of the rosary each morning and spend the year learning the mysteries.
“(May 3) was the National Day of Prayer,” Zook said. “How many children actually prayed on the National Day of Prayer? It’s not part of what they’re able to do, so we do it here.”
Mary Albanese, the school’s first-year principal, said Zook “draws the children in” to whatever subject she is teaching.
“She makes it relevant for them,” Albanese said. “She picks things that they’re interested in. She gets them all into what they’re doing.”
Albanese added that she recently asked Zook to speak to parents at an open house.
“I could not have asked for a better advertisement,” Albanese said. “She’s smiling, she’s enthusiastic, she’s upbeat. She loves the school, she loves the students. I never hear her say a negative word, and that’s the kind of person you need in your school.”
Zook, a member of St. Andrew Parish since Mass was celebrated in the nearby fire hall and high school before the church was built, said she is happy to contribute to her church 1community through her work.
“I feel it’s a vocation and not just a job,” Zook said. “I’ve been here for 14 years and I don’t want to go anywhere else. This is a way I think I can give to my parish and back to my faith and do what I love the most.”

Gretchen R. Crowe can be reached at gcrowe@catholicherald.com.