By SHARON KILPATRICK

By SHARON KILPATRICK

Rappahannock New* Staff Writer

After 26 years working with Rappahannock students Lilo Foster has retired.

For most of those years she has taught remedial reading. Without a college degree she could not be paid a teacher’s pay, but she did a teacher’s job. She started part time as a substitute.

One year a teacher quit in September and she was hired to finish out the semester teaching seventh grade at the Washington Elementary School. She ended up finishing the entire year.

With the new elementary school open, Mrs. Foster was hired to work as a teachers’ aid. She traveled from classroom to classroom, working with small groups of children who were behind in reading while the regular teacher worked with the rest of the class. For her last few years she had her own remedial lab.

“I loved what I did. I think I will miss it terribly,” she said.

She said she had her own method for teaching reading, with heavy emphasis on phonics in the beginning, using writing early as part of a “whole language” approach, and emphasis on comprehension after children have learned the basic skills. “I can teach anybody to read unless they are severely brain damaged,” she claimed.

It is rarely easy. A dynamic teacher, she said she frequently has to try different things with students. Sometimes she says she wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea of a new approach to take with a student. “I believe God gave me this idea, and it works,” she said. “I would teach standing on my head, if that is what it takes,” she added.

Growing up in Berlin, Germany, Mrs. Foster had no idea she would be teaching. She thought she would like to be a foreign correspondent. That required knowing several languages, and she began the study of English in fourth grade. She also learned some Spanish and some French. Her other career dream was to be a dancer.

She was the youngest of four children born to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. Early on her life was not bad. She attended Jewish parochial schools, where she got an excellent start. Then the Jewish schools were forced to close.

For a while she attended a Quaker school with other children of mixed Jewish heritage. When the Nazi authorities found out the school was serving Jewish children, that school was also closed and the owner sent to a concentration camp. After that she was tutored privately at home.

As war approached, things became worse. One of her sisters had a husband in England. He started sending telegrams urging her to get out and join him in England, Mrs. Foster said. “She left Berlin three days before Hitler moved into Poland,” she added. Mrs. Foster didn’t see her again until 1950, when she visited her sister in Toronto, Canada, where the couple moved after the war.

Someone insulted her father on the street, and her brother came to his defense,