Ms. Treska with her son, Calder. (Photo: provided)
I teach Literary Themes. I am also the Eleventh Grade Dean and the co-advisor for CARE. This is my first year at Northwood. My dad [Mike Treska ‘64] fell in love with this school, this town, and especially the people, and I was lucky enough to grow up in Lake Placid. Before Northwood, I taught for four years at St. Paul’s School for Boys, then spent fourteen years at Roland Park Country School. I loved it there, but I was eager to work in a place where my boys [Owen, 14, Baxter, 12, and Calder, 7] could also benefit from the educational community into which I was pouring my time, heart, and soul. I returned to the Adirondacks with them every summer, and when we weren’t there, I felt so homesick for the mountains. Mr. Pierce and I had a long talk, then we e-mailed our friend, Jill Walker, to see if there might be any openings at Northwood. We were eager to rejoin this close-knit community that our children could also be a part of, and so we did. My colleagues are wonderful; they are creative and passionate about working and living in these mountains. I love teaching and interacting with students, but although I have learned to cultivate an extroverted personality, I am a hard-core introvert. By Friday night, I am sort of talked-out. I just really need time and space and silence so that I can tune in to my rich and restorative inner life. One thing about me that may surprise people is that I really like rap and hip hop (as long as it’s not racist or misogynistic), especially MIA, Eminem, the Beastie Boys, and old-school stuff like Grandmaster Flash, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Run DMC. Really good rappers do amazing stuff with language; their use of cadence, internal rhyme, and double (even triple) entendre is virtuosic.
As told to Courtney Fairchild ’20
