After spending her full 16-year teaching career at North Harford High School, touching both the lives of faculty and students,  Mrs. Deborah Kosmer will be retiring. Upon reflecting on her career, her favorite part about being a teacher was, “getting to know my students and sharing what I think is the fun of learning math,”
During her retirement, Kosmer will be plenty busy as she wishes to travel and spend more time with her family. “I have a lot of places I want to go. I want to go to Iceland. I want to go to Europe. I want to go back to The Caribbean,” she explains.
Kosmer’s experience allows her to guide new teachers. Her       biggest piece of advice to teachers just starting off would be, “to not think that you can do it all your first year, but to realize that everything you do, you’ll get better at as you go along. And that it’s okay for that to happen, it’s okay to grow and change the way you do things and learn on the job, because you do have to do that,” states Kosmer.
The most impactful lesson Kosmer hopes she left on her students is, “that the math that they’re learning, all fits together into a big puzzle. Every piece that they learn as they go along as they go through high school and college is just another piece of that big puzzle. Their goal should always be not to memorize something just for a test, but to figure out how it fits together in the puzzle.”
The math teacher feels privileged to have been able to work with the other math teachers. She remarks, “We’ve had people come and go, but we’ve had just a wonderful wonderful math department here and it’s been a great place to work.”
When talking about Kosmer and her teaching, her coworkers had no problem coming up with kind things to say. “Mrs. Kosmer is a fantastic teacher that has a great ability to talk with the students and anticipate their needs and I hope to use those skills to assist students,” compliments math teacher Mrs. Shelly Sparks.
Kosmer’s influence on other teachers allows her legacy to live through their teaching after her departure. “I already learned a lot from Mrs. Kosmer, she’s been a great colleague. We always bounce ideas off of eachother so she and I have talked a lot and used a lot of different ideas together already. She’s very influential,” remarks math teacher Jenny Beigel.
A similar goodbye statement was given from both of her colleagues as they feel bittersweet about her departure.
“Don’t go! Stay! We will miss you terribly and the students are going to miss her wonderful ability to relate and teach and just be a fantastic person. But I wish her well in retirement and I hope she enjoys traveling the world and seeing and doing all of the things that she’s wanted to do,” states Sparks.
Similarly, Beigel expresses her feelings about Kosmer’s departure, “I’m going to miss her, but I hope she has a very happy and stress-free retirement and enjoys every moment of it.”