Chris Foster, a teacher at Warsaw Community High School, sees her life divided into quarters. The first quarter was learning about life and getting settled. The second was farming and the third teaching. Now she’s ready to move on to something else Born in Illinois, she was raised in Delaware since age 2. After graduating from Newark High School, she attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., where she earned her bachelor’s of science in education. She later earned her master’s of science in education at Indiana University. For 20 years, she and her husband raised hogs in southern Illinois. Her husband had to change jobs during the farm crisis of the late 1980s. Ferguson Farms brought them up to the Warsaw area. “I went to work for a public interest group helping family farmers. We were based in Washington, D.C., so I commuted back and forth,” she said. She landed a teaching job at Wawasee in 1989-90, before beginning for Warsaw in 1990-91. While at Warsaw, Foster taught English and U.S. history, then a combination class of the two. She taught yearbook for 10 years, and Honors Freshman and English composition. “I actually wanted to teach history, I majored in history. And my advisor pointed out to me that every coach in America taught U.S. history. Unless I wanted to do football, track or wrestling, possibly, I better have a better major than that. English was a good choice because every high school has four years of English. And I spent a lot of time teaching English before I started teaching history,” Foster recalled. “You can’t really teach literature well unless you understand the history behind it, so for me it was a good combination.” Though she was the teacher, Foster learned as much as her students over the years. “When I started teaching, my very first teaching job was in Maryland. It was a community that was very poor. Probably a third of the homes didn’t have running water or electricity in their homes. It was a very poor area in a rural area,” she said. “I learned that teaching really isn’t about content. It’s really about teaching students to learn and kind of guiding them into areas that will be helpful for them to get them to where they need to go. I learned that early, early on,” she continued. “Who cares if you can read Shakespeare if you don’t know what a contract says? I learned you need to be teaching literature, but you need to really focus on those communication skills that students really need to have in order to be successful.” Foster married a farmer after teaching in Maryland, and that’s when they relocated to Illinois. She didn’t teach in Illinois as she worked with her husband on the farm. Being around farming most of her life helped shaped Foster into the person she is today. When she was growing up, the Women’s Liberation Movement was alive. It helped women really become their own entity in society, she said. “In farming, I didn’t find that was the case. If you could plow 40 acres, and could do it well, it didn’t matter what you were. So that equality part didn’t figure in. My father raised me to be independent. He didn’t care if it was men or women, you had to do your best. So for me, that whole struggle, I kind of bypassed that, so I had the confidence to stand up and say what I believed even if it was a room full of men. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t,” she remembered. That lesson served her in working with kids. She was able to teach her students not to be afraid to state what they know as long as they have their “ducks in a row.” Her students are not afraid to say what they know in her class so long as they can defend it if challenged. “Being credible is really an important part of being the kind of person you want to be. If you want respect, it’s more than just giving it. You have to respect yourself enough to say I know this answer and I know how to find this answer. If you screw up, you fix it,” she stated. Foster’s confidence helped her take on new things. She had to teach yearbook, something she hadn’t done before, as part of accepting a job at Warsaw High School. She and her students learned how to do it together. Her first class was the first yearbook in Indiana to go completely digital, she said. “That first yearbook, it was like having a baby. You didn’t know what it was going to look like. We did all the work but had no idea what it looked like until it came back,” she said. Yearbook was a lot of fun, and provided more opportunities to learn. She learned that as a teacher, she has to provide opportunities for kids to use what they’re learning and show that they can do something important with it. Her next lesson learned as a teacher came when she was given a group of Latina women. They were bright and verbal, she said, but needed to learn to read and write in academic English. “They showed me a whole different way of learning. It wasn’t this straight someone speaking and they being quiet and listening, it was constant chattering because they were interpreting what I was saying to each other and then asking questions. It was total noise,” she recalled. The class also taught her a different approach to teamwork. It taught her that if people are going to work together and live in a community, they need to solve problems together. “The last thing is, kids are different now. What I find now is teaching kids how to learn, and how to apply it, is more important than content. Kids are not good at reading and interpreting what they read because the answers are quickly there for them on the Internet. If you can get an answer quickly without thinking about it, what does that teach you? Not to think. To just accept,” she said. Kids today have to be taught the importance of thinking. The quality of students is the same as far as them being bright, she said. They have the skills, they know how to get stuff done, it’s just convincing them to be competent enough to think for themselves. Foster was thinking about teaching one more year. But she realized WCHS was on top, being an “A” school, and she helped get it there. The new direction they’re taking, with more of a technology focus, is out of her comfort zone and she doesn’t want to lead that charge. “For me, it’s really been a pleasure to leave at this time. The kids still like me, and I still like the kids. I like what I do. The people I work with, I have a real high regard for them. It’s really been a blessing as far as a career,” she said. At the school awards convocation Friday, Foster was presented with the school’s “Going the Extra Mile Award.” WCHS Principal Troy Akers said, “Chris Foster has been a real ‘doer’ in her years at WCHS. Her love of students extends far outside the classroom. She has been a long-time department coordinator for the English department, student council sponsor, and has spent much time on fundraising activities for our students. Mrs. Foster has authored or co-authored thousands of dollars of grants for our student body. Specifically, students have benefitted greatly with annual trips to the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Illinois. Perhaps the largest trip is the annual freshman rafting trip on the Grassy Creek and Lake Tippecanoe. ... Finally, we will miss Mrs. Foster's support of all students in all settings. Mrs. Foster has set the bar high for future teachers!” A reception for Foster will be at Mad Anthony’s Thursday at 4:30 p.m.
