Ann Wittbrodt joined the Sonoma Valley High School math department this year,
after 23 years with Hewlett-Packard. Ryan lely/Sonoma valley sun
Ann Wittbrodt enjoyed her first summer vacation in long time this year — because she’s returned to her first love, teaching high school math. In May, after 23 years at Hewlett-Packard, most recently as Technology Director for Education Services, Wittbrodt retired to join the math department at Sonoma Valley High School.
Back in 1974, as a new Michigan State grad, she taught high school algebra and geometry in Midland, and for extra money was an instructor at a local community college. Four years later, she moved to Cape May, on New Jersey’s south shore, to teach math in its high school, which is similar in size to SVHS. The towns are similar, too, because Cape May also is a tourist town.
She wound up becoming head of the nine-person math department and teaching an early computer programming class “by staying a couple of steps ahead of the students.” This was before PCs, so students worked on six “dumb” terminals connected to a server, learning to program in Basic, Fortran and Pascal.
Even though Wittbrodt supplemented her high school salary by teaching at Atlantic City Community College, she couldn’t earn enough to buy a house. With the computer world “exploding,” in 1983 she decided to return to Michigan State for a master’s degree in computer science, supporting herself by teaching math half-time at Lansing Community College.
When she graduated in the spring of 1984, she jokes, being able to spell “computer” was enough get a job. Graduates competed to see who could get the most job offers from the recruiters who came to campus. Wittbrodt accepted one from H-P, moving to Silicon Valley to combine her teaching and computer skills in a job writing courses to educate the company’s customers, at almost double her math teacher’s salary.
After her son John was born in 1994, her husband Pete quit his job as general manager of a small construction company to stay home with him, while she continued to advance at H-P. Now that Wittbrodt is earning a teacher’s salary again, her husband has returned to construction work.
The family moved to Sonoma in 1999 because they didn’t want their son, now an eighth-grader at Altimira Middle School, to attend Silicon Valley’s high-pressure schools. Wittbrodt commuted 85 miles to Palo Alto, initially four days a week, but with telecommuting eventually only a couple of days a month.
As her son grew, she started missing teaching and feeling connected to what’s going on with kids, academically and socially. “I felt out of it,” she said. So last spring, when H-P offered early retirement, Wittbrodt decided to take the summer off, then return to teaching math. SVHS was her first choice, though she found openings at every high school in Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties.
Even though classrooms look different and technology has changed education — students use computers and interactive tutoring Web sites like hotmath.com—“the kids are still the kids.” Wittbrodt calls the teachers and staff at SVHS “topnotch and dedicated,” and sees few student cliques here, unlike other high schools where she’s taught.
Tired at the end of every day, Wittbrodt doesn’t miss her job at H-P because she’s having “real fun.” Being back in the classroom is “familiar, yet new and exciting.”
