Teacher and former student educate in same building

The fact that they teach alongside each other turned out to be complete coincidence. Fairfield West uses a concept called “departmentalizing” in which one teacher teaches some subjects, the other teacher instructs on the remainder. Biondo and Trimble were happily surprised to be paired.

Trimble said Biondo “was a teacher that I really learned a lot from. She helped me in my path to teaching. I always felt like we were kind of a family — we developed a really close relationship with a class as our teacher.”

Biondo was still working that way Wednesday when she gathered her students in a circle, talking about how she once had a fruit salad, but because that salad had one bad banana in it, the whole salad was ruined — meaning that everyone in the class should be on their best behavior.

For her part, Trimble was getting to know the students Wednesday, getting their attention by singing the “shave and a haircut” song often heard in cartoons.

“It’s not a solo, it’s a chorus,” she told the kids, asking them to respond in unison.

When Biondo found out she was paired with Trimble as her teacher, a sense of deja vu struck her.

“When I started teaching my first year, I returned to the school, and I was on the same (grade) level as my fourth-grade teacher. Now I’m on the other side of it as the teacher having the student, where I had been the student who was working with the teacher. So it’s especially full circle for me,” she said.

And the coincidences didn’t end there. She had also encountered Trimble as a parent when Biondo’s children went to Trimble’s elementary school. Biondo remembered Trimble as “a really hard worker, very sweet. She was caring to the other students and had a really strong group of friends,” Biondo said.

Before this school year started, “We had a teacher retire in our grade level, and I was going to be placed with the new teacher,” Trimble said. That turned out to be Biondo — and that was all for the better.

“I just always had really great teachers that instilled a love for learning. Through my experiences as a student, I had the opporunity to tutor some students. It exciting to see them get excited about learning. So that was my big ah-ha — this is what I’m supposed to do (moment),” Trimble said.