Clip of Mrs. Nowak playing “Hallelujah” during Winter Week a few years ago.

“Wait, Ms. Nowak… you play rugby, and you wrestle too? Are you like an assassin or something?” asked sophomore Ricky Levitt during a recent Spanish class.

“No Ricky, of course I’m not an assassin!” Ms. Nowak replied, laughing.

“Well, you definitely have some kind of secret life.”

While in school, teachers are the people who make us do homework, lecture us, and give us tests, but often students don’t think of them beyond this capacity. Often we forget that, like us, teachers have lives, families, and interests outside of school.

Many students know Lisa Nowak as a faculty member, a coach, and a mentor, but few of us know that she is also a wrestler, rugby player, world traveler and musician.

Nowak was born in Germany and lived there for three years until moving with her parents and brother to Maine, where she spent the rest of her childhood. Lisa’s father, a wrestling coach, introduced her to the family sport at a young age. Due to this early exposure, she went on to join the wrestling team in high school, as well as the track, soccer, and tennis teams. After coaching track this winter, Nowak went for a change of scenery and coached the tennis team.

“This is the first spring that I haven’t done track since I was five,” says Nowak. “It feels really strange not to be running, but I love coaching tennis!”

As a senior at Wheaton College, a 21-year-old Lisa decided to expand her musical knowledge by teaching herself to play the guitar. As a result of playing flute for 13 years, she felt picking up a new instrument wasn’t too hard. After about six months of newly callused fingers and studying her poster of guitar chords, Nowak took the stage at open mic night and started her career with Jack, her female guitar.

Clip of Mrs. Nowak singing a duet with Bobby Dresser (’10) during the 2010 Staff/Student Talent Show.

Eventually, Nowak started a band with a friend and fellow musician. They continued playing at restaurants and open mic nights and writing music together until eventually parting ways. Having mastered the guitar, Lisa journeyed north to the Hyde School in Maine, where she taught Spanish, performing arts, wrestling and track for two years, until moving here to Wayland.

During her summers at Hyde School and Wayland, Nowak just couldn’t stay away from school. Using four years of summer vacation, she got her masters degree of arts in Spanish at Middlebury College.

After teaching at WHS for two years, Lisa Nowak decided to fulfill another life goal: going to Italy and learning Italian. Within a month of her decision, she had a job teaching first grade at an international elementary school and giving private guitar lessons to 5 and 6-year-olds. Using her knowledge of the Spanish language, Nowak taught herself Italian by immersing herself in Italian culture.

Says Nowak, “At the beginning I would just speak Spanish, and people would reply in Italian. For awhile I spoke in a mix of Spanish and Italian. Eventually I got it!”

In addition to the continuation of her many activities, Nowak hopes to start a band with her boyfriend, who is also a musician, and finish the children’s CD she is writing for her niece and nephew. The CD contains songs about colors, numbers and animals, and each song is in both Spanish and English.

As Wayland High School wraps up the school year and teachers struggle to fit in last-minute reviews for finals, Nowak struggled with a difficult decision: Come back to Wayland next year, or get her masters in education at Harvard?

“Staying at Wayland is the right thing for me, it’s really as simple as that,” said Nowak. “There are great opportunities between Spanish, music and coaching sports. I really just love this community.”