TORONTO — Lorna Leibovici, a nursery and Grade 1 general studies teacher at Associated Hebrew Schools’ Posluns Education Centre, has a choice of seats in her two classrooms.
Lorna Leibovici with Latke Man in her nursery classroom last month. [Frances Kraft photo]
In her Grade 1 classroom, there’s a student-sized chair that’s been hand-painted for her and adorned with the words “Mrs. Leibovici’s special chair.” Another one is labelled her “magic power chair” and is stationed in front of a computer. There’s also a tall, shapely stool known as the “throne,” which is sometimes used for reading stories, or she might sit on a wicker rocker in the nursery classroom.
But she says she rarely sits in a chair.
“I’ll show you exactly how I sit in the morning,” she said in a before-school interview, nimbly assuming a cross-legged position on the floor of her nursery classroom.
“I’m always on the floor, and I’m never clean. I had blue under my nails for two weeks from painting Maccabees.”
A veteran educator with more energy than some of her younger counterparts, Leibovici has worked at Associated for the better part of three decades, following a five-year stint at Or Haemet Sephardic School.
As a longtime teacher, “you have to be open-minded, willing to learn and willing to try [new things]… I think you really have to stretch yourself,” she said.
Despite her experience in education, she tells her students that she’s “still a little kid. I’ve just been around longer.”
As a child, the Toronto native used to set up her dolls classroom-style at home. Her sister would sit with them, and the future teacher would preside at the front of her “class,” entering marks in a workbook and blowing a pretend pitch pipe before asking them to sing.
After high school, she attended Lakeshore Teachers College, then began her career teaching Grade 2 and kindergarten at Wilmington Avenue Public School before taking time off to stay home with her two young sons. She earned her primary specialist’s certification through a summer course.
Leibovici enjoys her work so much that she said everyone should have an opportunity to spend a few days in a primary classroom like hers. “You can be yourself. You can be happy. You can sing.”
Notwithstanding her effervescent personality, the fact that she starts and ends each school day with a song, and the warmth she demonstrates by signing all the children’s work with a smiley face and the words, “Love, Mrs. L.,” inside a heart, Leibovici said she is “very strict.
“I truly believe students have to be respectful of their school, of their environment, and of each other. I try to enforce it in a nice way.
“Their time in school should be joyful.”
A lesson from the teacher: Leibovici shares this mantra with students who are having difficulty, pointedly ticking off each word on the fingers of one hand: “The more you do it, the better you get… and then you get to be the best.”
