BHS is experiencing a loss this week as science teacher Lisa Bugenske retires. 

Bugenske grew up in Saginaw, Michigan and attended Arthur Hill High School. She describes it as a working class town where there were a lot of general motors factories. 

“It had graduating classes of about 500 students, so it was a fairly large high school. It was very diverse and most of the families that went there were also probably working class,” she said. 

Bugenske did not start off as a teacher. She began her career as an engineer and discovered later that she wanted to become a teacher.

“A small part of my job was educating people on how to be safer and how to follow environmental regulations to make sure that we were in compliance,” she said. “ I really enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and I decided that I’d rather do it with kids than with adults.” 

Another reason she became a teacher was because the hours worked out better for where she was in life. 

“I was starting a family, and looking at having two people working corporate jobs and traveling all the time wasn’t really how I wanted to raise my kids, so teaching aligned better,” she said.

Bugenske went on to have a successful 22-year career teaching science. 

“It’s all been science,” she said. “I’ve done middle school— seventh grade science, and at the high school level I’ve taught biology, environmental science, physics and robotics.”

Sophomore Lyndia Zheng says Bugenske has impacted the way she feels about physics. 

“I really love Mrs. Bugenske’s teaching style,” Zheng said. “She’s always patient, and she is very good at explaining difficult concepts. I have learned to really love physics.”

Before coming to Beachwood, Bugenske taught at Shaker Middle School and overseas in China. 

“I taught at Shanghai American School, which is like a private American school,” she said. “And then I worked, not directly as a teacher, but in an educational capacity with Shaker Middle School with a non-profit program… I was helping at-risk kids to engage more with school.” 

She says that Beachwood is not all that different from Shaker.

 “[It was] a lot of the same population of kids, and colleagues were great—so very similar,” she said.

Shanghai American School was obviously very different. 

“The fact that it was in China [made it] fairly different,” she said. “It was still an American curriculum, but there were kids from all over the world.” 

“I had kids from Korea, China, Europe, Australia…” she added. “And so English as a second language was very common, and a lot of the way that we taught really focused on helping students with language acquisition too.”

No matter what or where she is teaching, Bugenske makes her students feel more secure with their learning and guides them to trust their own abilities.

“She encourages her students to be brave and to believe in our answers and to speak out loud,” Zheng said. “So oftentimes if she has a question she will not just give the answer, she will wait for someone to say something, and she encourages everyone to say something at least once in the lesson.”

“She taught me a lot about being confident in my answers…her class has made me feel more comfortable in my answers and my own work,” Zheng said.

Bugenske explained why she decided to retire this year.

“My husband and I always had a goal of retiring by 50, and I’ll be 53 at the end of this school year, so we waited until both our kids were out of college and had jobs,” she said. “So that was kind of the timing. So it’s always been a goal and now we’re just ready to start the next chapter.”

After retiring, Bugenske and her husband plan to spend time traveling.

“Our parents are still in Michigan so we plan to spend some time there,” she said. “I love to travel. So we’ve already got some trips planned: backpacking in the upper peninsula of Michigan, we’re going to do a safari in South Africa, a possibility of Portugal. And then the big thing is we are planning to build our own  small cabin. So we will get some property in Michigan and build a cabin. And, you know, build it ourselves. We like those kinds of projects. So I’m excited about that.” 

When she leaves the high school she will miss meeting new people every year.

“I still learn a lot from other people, and just being exposed to everybody; every year a new set of people is really interesting to me, so I’m going to miss that,” she said. 

She will also miss the challenge of being a teacher. 

“I’m going to miss figuring out where students’ misconceptions are and then developing activities and plans to kind of root out the misconceptions and overcome them; that’s probably one of my favorite parts of teaching,” she said.

Bugenske  loves seeing when she can help students understand a concept they have been struggling with. 

“[My] favorite moment as a teacher is–it’s going to sound like a cliche but—when you see the lightbulb go off,” she said. 

Students will miss Bugenske, who has a reputation as a caring teacher. 

“I am really disappointed that I won’t have her as my physics 2 teacher next year, and I have a younger sibling who’s a freshman, and I know she is sad that she won’t be having her either,” Zheng said. “But I do hope– and I know the rest of her students feel the same way–that she has a very happy retirement.”