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Betsy Wahl
B.A., UC Santa Cruz, Biology and Environmental Studies
Credential, UC Berkeley, Single Subject Life Science
M.A. (all but thesis), S. F. State University, Systematic Biology
Betsy was born in Boston, but raised in Marin in a large and rather science oriented family. While an undergraduate studying biology at UCSC, she did an internship with the Life Lab program, which gave her a taste for teaching in a garden setting long before Alice Waters made this popular. Later she worked in a fourth grade class helping primarily with math and science. These experiences working with children helped her decide to pursue a teaching credential in science at UC Berkeley instead of a degree in library science, which was also under consideration (Betsy is an avid reader and worked for several of her college years in the library). After teaching science , 6th, 7th and 8th grade sequentially, at Adams Middle School in Richmond, she went back to school herself to study Aquatic Biology at S.F. State University. Here she especially enjoyed her first classes in entomology and invertebrate zoology having studied mostly botany as an undergraduate. Family and work at an ecological consulting firm intervened, and she quit her job and worked on her master’s thesis with the birth of her first child (now fourteen). Two more children and a decade later she returned to teaching as Lower School Science teacher at Crowden. Betsy, who lives in Berkeley with her husband, three daughters, and the neurotic dog Millie, enjoys gardening, reading, and volleyball, which she coaches for her daughters’ teams.