After 33 years of teaching, Beth Binkowski has taken early retirement from the Linton School and plans to “dig” in her garden, travel, read, write, tend cattle and help her husband, Fred, with his woodworking projects.

“It probably won’t sink in until next fall when school starts,” Binkowski said about her retirement. “I absolutely love teaching, and it has never been a job to me. I wanted to leave while I still felt I was doing a good job. I don’t want to be an old ‘battle axe’ that won’t go away.”

She said she appreciates all of the kids she has had in her room over the years as well as the parents who have supported her as a teacher.

“I will really miss the kids,” she said, noting that she has enjoyed working with the other teachers and the administrators throughout her career.

Binkowski, the second grade teacher this year, has always taught second, third or fourth grade.

“Kids in the early grades are so spontaneous and loving,” she observed. “They look up to teachers at that age. I treasure the notes and special letters I have received.”

She admits that she has learned more from the students than maybe they have from her.

“Kids help you see the world through the eyes of a child, which is a good way to view the world,” she said.

Her philosophy of education is to have fun so that kids learn and don’t know it.

“I like to have fun, and I hope I have imparted that to them,” she said.

Students remember Binkowski for the poetry break she has every week where kids recite poems.

“High school kids and former students who are now adults can still remember the poetry, and that’s fun when they see me and recite a poem from one of my classes,” she said.

That is among her rewards as a veteran teacher, along with former students who come back years later and say they appreciated her as a teacher.

“It’s amazing that some of the most appreciative people were, shall we say, ‘challenging’ students,” she laughed.

Today’s students

Binkowski said today’s elementary students are more worldly than their counterparts were 30 years ago.

“Kids start school with more knowledge because of TV, computers and travel,” she said. “Years ago, many people didn’t stray far from Emmons County.”

She said there are things she no longer has to teach because of what kids learn from their environment.

“When I was starting out, I had a student who said he had seen an ocean,” Binkowski said, “when we were studying oceans. I asked him where he saw it, and he said it was at Eureka (which has a lake at the edge of town). Now, kids have seen TV programs about oceans and some have traveled and seen them.”

Binkowski said kids are so computer savvy when they start school that she would like to see keyboarding taught in the early grades.

She is also impressed by the vocabulary students have when they start school, which she attributes to broader exposure to the world through the media.

The beginning

Binkowski is the daughter of Ellen Fransen of Hazelton and the late Carl Fransen. She has twin brothers. Richard (Diane) lives in Mobridge, S.D., and Roger is in Vancouver, Wash.

She graduated from Hazelton in 1969 and attended North Dakota State University, Fargo, for two years, before earning her B.S. Degree in Social Work from the University of Mary in Bismarck.

“I wanted to leave North Dakota and said I was never coming back,” Binkowski admitted. “I decided to go to Albuquerque, N.M., because I didn’t know anyone who was going there.”

She said she looked like she was 15, and nobody would hire her as a social worker. She was working at a day care center in Albuquerque when she met Fred, a native of Rutherford, N.J. (15 miles from downtown New York City), who had moved to the southwest after working for Bell Laboratories in Georgia. They were both students at the University of New Mexico, where Beth received her second degree—a B.S. in Elementary Education. She jokes that she was “full of B.S. twice.”

Fred and Beth were married in Hazelton on Dec. 28, 1973, and made the round trip in their Volkswagen Beetle, which was equipped with everything but a heater.

Their honeymoon trip was a 7,500-mile motorcycle trip from Albuquerque to North Dakota to New Jersey and back to New Mexico.

On April 1, 1975, the young couple moved to a house Beth’s dad owned in Temvik. There was a blizzard that day, and their first task was to shovel snow out of the living room of the old house. Neighbors John and Theresa Braun came over, and everyone sat around wearing coats.

“The Brauns were very good to us, and later Theresa said she was afraid we would freeze to death in that house,” Beth said.

She said they lived without running water. They milked goats and made goat cheese and yogurt.

In 1980, they purchased and moved to the former John Schatz farm south of Temvik where they now have a small cow-calf operation, along with alfalfa ground and pasture.

It’s the farm where Beth will stage her retirement—digging in the dirt, helping Fred, reading, writing and, of course, planning trips.

So many changes

Binkowski started her teaching career in 1975 at the Hague Elementary School where she taught the combined third and fourth grades for a salary of $6,000.

“I was hired over the phone,” she remembered.

She taught in Hague for three years and says she enjoyed every minute of it. She took a high school aide position in Linton for the 1978-79 school year to be closer to home.

Her first full-time position in Linton was in 1981 when she taught fourth grade.

“When I started out, we used hand-crank ditto machines to make copies, and you ended up all purple. Now, we use fancy copiers that jam, and you end up all black. We’ve come a long way,” she said, just kidding.

She said teachers have so many more supplies and teaching tools today. Textbooks are more colorful and fun, computers add a new dimension to the classroom, library books are plentiful and art supplies are available to teachers.

For years, film strips were used in the classroom, and kids almost fought over who would get to help their teacher manually roll the film.

“Now we have a TV in the room along with VCRs and DVD players,” she said. “We don’t need encyclopedias because we can ‘google’ on the Internet for information and pictures. That’s fun.”

When a class is studying something—the weather, for example—Binkowski relies on videos, which she said have more impact than reading a chapter in a book about the weather.

Virtually all of the families of Binkowski’s students have computers at home, so kids start school with some knowledge of the digital age.

Record players are a thing of the past but were once standard equipment in a classroom.

“If kids saw a record today, they would wonder what kind of CD it was,” she chuckled.

Until two years ago, Binkowski and other elementary teachers did not have a phone in their classrooms.

“We had to go down the hall and up a flight of stairs to take a phone call,” she said. “I’m still not used to the convenience and find myself going down the hall to see another teacher when I could have used the phone.”

Digging in the dirt

Binkowski, 56, decided to retire early, in part, because she wanted the flexibility to travel and, not knowing what the future holds, to not wait to do things when it could be too late.

“Our daughter Aleah and her husband (R.J. Binkowski-Burk) live in Portland, Ore., and I want to be able to visit them more often,” she said.

The Binkowskis are turning their home over to a “farm sitter” for a month this summer and driving to Alaska with their camper.

“We had planned the trip for our 30th wedding anniversary, but that didn’t work out so now we’re going on our 35th,” she said.

On the way back, they will camp with Aleah and R.J. in British Columbia, Canada.

The Binkowskis have made many trips to the two coasts, the southwest and Canada, and their travel goals include visits to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Washington, D.C.

Binkowski said there are “lot of things” she wants to do that she couldn’t do while working full time.

“Our farm is a labor of love, and there is a lot of labor left to do,” she joked.

She laughed that she has so many projects that Fred “will probably be begging the school to take me back.”

One of her goals is to take the Master Gardener’s course through the North Dakota Extension Service. Some will wonder why she needs any gardening education when working in the dirt is already a major hobby—she says she has dirt under her finger nails six months of the year. For example, she transplanted 120 pepper plants last week that she started from seed. The Binkowskis’ home has a greenhouse entryway where she starts plants.

Binkowski also wants to spend more time with her mother, Ellen Fransen of Hazelton, who celebrated her 80th birthday last year, in combination with the wedding vows renewal of Aleah and R.J.

Binkowski likes what a cousin told her, “Enjoy your last days of teaching and then just dance right out the door.”