JAY — Nancy Grimaldi loves her middle-schoolers.

“They always surprise me. We never know from one day to the next what they’ll say or do,” she said. “They still do kid things, and also do adult things, too.”

Grimaldi, of Jay, will retire at the end of the school year after teaching middle-school students for 30 years.

She is an eighth-grade Language Arts teacher at Spruce Mountain Middle School.

Grimaldi, 61, had always wanted to be a teacher.

When she was a child, she’d play school with her younger siblings.

“I never had a dream for anything else,” she said.

Her mom was a nurse, and her dad was always involved with children as a coach or helping to clear trails.

Nancy Grimaldi is the eldest of the family’s seven children. Her sister, math teacher Julie Taylor, who also teaches at SMMS, is the youngest.

Grimaldi said she decided to retire now while she still enjoyed coming to school every day.

“I’m just ready,” she said.

She knows she’ll miss the students, as well as the staff. Many of them, she said, have become family over the years.

“I want to do some different things or anything I want to do and not have to plan around work,” she said.

Her husband, Marco, is a self-employed concrete contractor. His off time is generally in the winter months when Grimaldi is at school. With her upcoming retirement, they should have more time to take vacations or travel together.

They have three adult children and five grandchildren. Some of those grandchildren live out-of-state, so she hopes to visit them more often.

She said she might volunteer in the school, as she did when her own children were young.

When the last day of school comes in mid-June, she said she’ll be excited, but she’ll also miss the people.

“Middle-school teachers are a special breed,” she said.

Grimaldi graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington, taught for a few years, then stayed home with her children. She returned to the classroom full-time in 1987.

She hopes to have more time to read historical fiction and mysteries, as well as to continue growing a vegetable garden and canning its produce.

“I love canning tomatoes and making jams,” she said.

She and her extended family have a camp on Round Pond in North Livermore, which allows everyone to get together.

Teaching has changed a lot in the years she has been in the classroom. At first, there was the junior high school philosophy that then changed to a middle school philosophy. Now there are new learning standards and standardized tests. But most of all, the technology had changed; both Grimaldi and her students use computers extensively in most of their work.

But her attitude toward teaching and what she expects has changed very little.

“I want to be there for them and to make it known I’m available; that they can ask questions. I want them to respect each other,” she said.

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