TORONTO —Kate Sable, a Grade 5 teacher at the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School, feels very lucky to be doing the work she does.
Kate Sable [Frances Kraft photo]
At the suggestion of her husband, Jordan, a teacher at the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, Sable began to consider a career in education after moving to Toronto in 2000.
Volunteering in a couple of schools gave her “a sense that it was the right thing for me.”
When the couple met, Kate, a native of Des Moines, Iowa, was working for a non-profit in North Carolina, and Jordan, who is from Toronto, was in graduate school there.
She has helped research the effects of domestic violence on children, and taught violence prevention programs in the Durham, N.C., school system. In Toronto, at first, she worked as a violence prevention counsellor for women and children.
A graduate of the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Sable, 39 – “Morah Kate” to her students – also has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Yale University.
Her work as a Grade 5 core teacher at Penna, where she has been teaching since 2002, is “incredibly stimulating,” she said.
In the classroom, she strives to be warm, firm, excited and caring – and to set a high standard, she said.
Sable especially loves teaching math. For practice in computation, she likes to use “$1 words.” and her students seem to enjoy the exercise as much as she does. A monetary value is assigned to each letter of the alphabet (“a” equals 1 cent, “b” equals 2 cents, and so on), and the students have to try to find words that add up to a dollar.
Although Sable wasn’t specifically looking to work in a Jewish school, she found the environment comforting, having lost her father shortly before she began working there.
“Finding this school has been incredibly special. It’s been deeply gratifying to me… It just felt like a very safe and nurturing place.”
As well, she noted, she and Jordan have chosen to send their two sons to the school. “My husband’s family – his grandfather, his father and mother – have provided a great model for commitment to Jewish education… My husband and I have tried to follow that model in some small way.”
And yes, she said, she does talk shop with her husband – as well as with his brother, Josh, who is also a teacher at TanenbaumCHAT, her in-laws (a teacher and a former teacher), and her sister-in-law, who works in the school system, too.
“I really love what I do,” she said.
A lesson from the teacher: “Even though it’s my fourth year teaching Grade 5, it still stays new. I have 16 kids and there are 16 different brains trying to learn new information… Each kid is like a puzzle you have to figure out.”
