Teacher’s first book is tale she wrote for her own children
LOWER MERION » Nearly 30 years ago, Susan Dezenhall Schwartz of Merion and a teacher at Barrack Academy in Bryn Mawr, wrote a children’s story for her daughters about a teacher named Sondra Byer.
Schwartz described it as having a bit of magic in the story but not the kind you might find in a Harry Potter book. Some of that magic comes from where the story came from.
Although it’s a work of fiction, Schwartz said that it is based around her mother, Sondra Byer Dezenhall, who passed away in 1987. She, too, was a teacher.
Without going too deeply into the story, there were many elements taken from the real Sondra Byer’s life and put into the character, Schwartz said.
Although the book has just gone to print, it began taking shape three decades ago shortly after her mother’s death. At that time, her first daughter was born, and over the next few years, she wanted a story that would help her children connect with her mother.
“I’m looking at these beautiful little girls, and they had no idea of this magical grandmother they came from,” Schwartz said.
With the encouragement of her daughters, that story has made its way into print as “The Secret of Sondra Byer’s Second Grade Class.”
The story involves the secondgrade classroom in the fictional community of Cherry County, where every kid hopes to be one of the lucky ones to attend the mysterious class of Ms. Sondra Byer.
In the story, Byer travels the world and only comes back to Cherry County to teach every five years.
“Her classroom is held in a little cottage behind the school that used to be a one-room schoolhouse,”
Schwartz said.
Not only do the children hope to get into her class, but the parents also want to see their kids get admitted.
So why does everyone want to get into the class?
The children are attracted to the things Sondra Byer leaves behind each time she leaves for one of her trips. Throughout her time away, Byer leaves projects involving stuff she’s collected throughout her travels. Those items become a sort of museum in the school’s library,
Schwartz said.
At the same time, the parents of other students in her class notice positive changes in their children.
Schwartz said she never considered the story that she wrote for her children would ever get published.
“Sometimes, you could be working on 20 different projects,” Schwartz said. “This was not one that I thought would ever see the light of day because this was for my daughters.”
The book went on sale through Amazon last month, and a portion of the proceeds from the book will go to ovarian cancer research, she said.
When she isn’t writing, Schwartz is a language teacher at Barrack Academy in Bryn Mawr.
So how did an old story Schwartz told her children decades ago ever make into print?
According to Schwartz, about two years ago, on Mother’s Day, she took out an old copy of it and gave it to her daughters to read. It would be the first time they’d seen the story as adults.
The consensus from them was that others would probably like the story too.
Last month on Mother’s Day, as the book was about to go online for sale, Schwartz said she found something she never expected.
As she was looking through her old 1965 edition of “The Once and Future King” that she’s kept since high school, she found an old coffee-stained note containing the beginning of her story.
“The morning the book was going live from the publisher, there it was ... that first crumbling paper that was probably something I had rejected,” Schwartz said.