by Alok Ganguly
Public Relations

Think about where your teachers go when school is over. Over the years, the rumors that teachers sleep and spend their whole lives in the school vanished, and everyone realized that teachers go to their own homes and spend time with their own families. But what do they do over summer vacation?

Laine Winokur, a history teacher at WA, is the complete opposite. She spends her time over the summer giving tours at the Lexington Historical Society. Her day is spent teaching visitors about how life was led by ordinary people in colonial times, and every aspect is covered in the tour, from food to education.

“The longer you spend there, the more you learn, from other guides and from reading. Your tour moves away from the script and you add things or you don’t talk about things that you don’t find interesting, so my tour is unique and a little different from what you might hear from other guides,” said Winokur.

Winokur spends her time touring at the Munroe Tavern, which used to be a British field hospital during the Revolutionary War. In order to fully immerse the tourists in the colonial experience, Winokur herself dresses in a complete colonial costume. There are no buttons, and no zippers, and everything is tied or pinned together. Winokur has to don a full body under-garment, a skirt sewn with homemade pockets, a jacket, an apron, a bonnet, stockings, and shoes. Despite all of these items, she is able to spend four to five hours per day giving tours of the building without collapsing from dehydration; she is very thankful that the buildings are air-conditioned.

This summer will be Winokur’s fourth year working with the Lexington Historical Society. Starting out as an intern when she was in college, Winokur would help schedule all of the tours for the guides and catalogue inventory for the gift shops, but she wanted to interact with people more. She returned the next summer as a guide, and has spent the past three years in the same position.

Not only did the internship at the society lead to Winokur’s job as a tour guide, but it also reinforced her goal of being a teacher.

“It really cemented for me that I wanted to be in a classroom, year round,” she said.

Winokur feels the same sense of accomplishment that she gains from teaching students at WA.

“My favorite part of the job is similar to my favorite part of teaching, it’s when somebody comes in saying that their parents dragged them there and they don’t want to be there, and then you get people actually interested in the tour and invested and you can start to see them saying that it isn’t actually that boring, it’s kind of interesting, and that’s always fun,” said Winokur with a smile.