Classroom legend

English, history teacher Sharon Freed built meaningful connections with thousands of students

By: Ben Waldman

The house is stuffed to the brim with evidence of her.

In the living room, there is a handmade tea cart that supports an ornate Russian samovar, a traditional device for heating water. On a couch beside it sit a pair of cardboard boxes containing a complete set of Nancy Drew books.

The dining room walls are adorned with oil paintings, and a tea set rests above a chest containing fine china. On the fridge is a small photograph of Queen Elizabeth. In the basement, hundreds of books await their next reader.

There was no mistaking who had lived there for the past 30 years. Even if I didn’t know whose house I had walked into, I would have known it belonged to Sharon Freed. She died at 71 in December, after a 45-year career teaching high school English and history to thousands of Winnipeg students, including me.

At the dining room table (a family heirloom), her daughters, Andrea and Nicole, sit on a cold January morning, trying to make sense of the fact she wasn’t home.

Although a month had passed since Freed’s death, it had yet to set in. Now, they were left to sift through all of the things — books, silverware, thousands of pieces of Made-in-Occupied-Japan merchandise she had meticulously collected — that remained.

"Look at this," Andrea said, holding up a coin from 1909 an ancestor brought to Winnipeg when they emigrated from Europe. "She kept it all."

"She was truly authentic," said Freed’s younger sister, Marilyn. "She surrounded herself with people and things she believed in and felt were meaningful."

Sharon Freed was born Sharon Beloff, on Dec. 1, 1948, and grew up in Winnipeg’s North End in a house on Rupertsland Avenue.

She read voraciously, often turning down bike rides or party invitations so she could curl up on the couch with a novel or history book. As a teenager, she was enamoured by the monarchy. She saved newspaper clippings commemorating key moments in royal lore; she wrote to Buckingham Palace to ask for a job.

With verve, she researched her family roots, which traced back to Russia and Romania, and discovered an unquenchable thirst to learn about Czarist Russia. Rasputin, the "mad monk" of Czar Nicholas II’s inner circle, cast a mystical spell over her, as did classic novels by Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

At 19, Freed entered teachers college, where she was unsure whether she was cut out to stand at the front of a classroom. She worried whether she could be strict enough, and wondered if she had it in her to be a disciplinarian or educator — fears which in retrospect feel unbelievable.

Soon, she started her teaching career by working split days at Christ the King School and I.L. Peretz School, busing across the city at lunch hour to make it to class on time. Eventually, she found her place at Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate, now a part of Gray Academy, where she became a dynamic educator, and in many ways, an iconic figure in the Jewish community.

Mrs. Freed struck quite the impression: her hair curled, her voice sharp, her elocution impeccable. On the blackboard, in yellow chalk, she’d write in cursive a "Quote of Note" each day, and mounted on the wall of her classroom was a portrait of the Queen, a touch of regality that echoed her aura.

When students behaved properly, and if they asked nicely, she’d pull out the Scrabble board and would inevitably whup them. (I beat her two or three times out of maybe 25 matches.)

She taught us Arthur Miller, John Knowles, and William Shakespeare, herself an embodiment of the Bard’s contention the whole world is a stage. Once, she stood up to perform the classic poem Casey at the Bat, and the stanzas built as mightily as the titular slugger swung. Her voice climbed up and down, with an attention to rhythm and rhyme, and the class sat in silence, somewhat awestruck.

In 2015, when they learned she would be retiring, her Grade 11 students surprised her by taking her out to lunch, pooling together their money to pay for a meal at 529 Wellington. They toasted her with speeches and, when she thought they weren’t looking, paid a substantial part of the bill.

Lori Binder, Gray Academy’s head of school and chief executive officer, was one of several school staff who learned from Freed as a student before working with her as a colleague.

"Whether you had her as a teacher a decade ago, three decades ago, or 47 years ago, every one of her students could share stories about Sharon," she said. "She had the ability to be real and human, which is why I think students were able to build such deep relationships with her.

"She shared herself with her students."

For Freed’s daughters, it was always clear how much care their mother put into her work: "We were her life, but she had 5,000 kids."

The day before she died, a group of teachers visited Freed, singing her a Yiddish song she always requested, Oyfn Pripetchik. "Learn children, with enthusiasm, as I teach you," the last verse begins.

At her funeral, hundreds packed into the synagogue to pay their respects. Appropriately, Rabbi Matthew Leibl, who was conducting the service, was a former student of hers. "Mrs. Freed is a legend," he told the crowd.

In the Jewish community, without ever trying to be, Freed became a figure of remarkable renown. She maintained connections with hundreds of former students, keeping their handwritten letters and sending them messages, almost at random, to tell them she was proud of them.

"She was loyal to her calling, to her code and, most of all, to her children; thousands of us," said Skye Kneller, a former student who posed in her graduation photos with a tiara-wearing Freed. "Privileged to have seats to the queen of the classroom."

It was fitting so many students and teachers felt compelled to bid her adieu, standing in the bitter cold at a cemetery in the North End. Several former students served as pallbearers.

Once again, she was surrounded by the people she believed in.

She will always be a legend — only, she really did exist.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca