Marla Greenwald, Class of 1995, is a Falk “lifer”—and not just because she attended the school from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade. She’s also raising a second generation of Falk students today, both as a parent and a teacher. 

Happy Place 

“My closest friends in life are still my classmates from Falk,” Greenwald says, adding that there's a special “connection and familiarity” that comes with returning to the school she loved growing up. “I was a kid who always wanted to participate. I was very social. I always wanted to be involved. School was my happy place, and I really loved coming [here] every day.” 

Starting in kindergarten, “my teacher taught me a lot about patience and making sure every kid was seen,” Greenwald shares. Also in her Primary years, she was introduced to theater—a common thread in the Falk experience—when her class put on a performance of “The Berenstain Bears” in kindergarten.

Greenwald and her classmate Lauren in “Berenstain Bears” 

At the Intermediate level, she played a pirate in “Peter Pan,” and in Middle School, she and her classmates performed “Much Ado About Nothing” in Greg Wittig’s class. “He connected with a Pitt theater that I believe was called The Pit,” Greenwald says, “and we were able to perform on their stage and use their costumes. I played Beatrice, with my best friend [as] Benedick.” 

Of course, Greenwald also remembers the iconic annual musicals, which remain a source of excitement at the school today. “Being a primary student and watching the middle schoolers perform the musical, you just felt like you were on Broadway.” 

Greenwald and her classmates performing “Much Ado About Nothing” 

In the classroom, Greenwald’s favorites were reading, writing, and Spanish. “[Marian] Vollmer, at a young age, really pushed my literacy skills,” and in Joanne Ridge’s class, “we wrote picture books. It was a very labor-intensive experience, where we drafted stories and blocked out what text [and illustrations] would go on each page,” Greenwald remembers. 

“We had to spread our story across every page so that when you opened it, there was a title page, followed by the story, and it was paced to fill the whole book. I have two fully executed picture books, drawn, illustrated, and colored by hand. It felt so professional.”

When Greenwald got to Middle School, Carmela Maccarelli introduced her to Spanish, an experience that would later play a major role in her life and career. Maccarelli was a true character, sometimes wearing scrubs to class and performing “surgery” on Spanish verbs by chopping off the ending and adding a new one to conjugate it.

“At the time,” Greenwald says, “[middle schoolers] would do half of sixth grade in Spanish and half in French, and then you had to pick. There was no question for me what direction I was taking.” 

A Career in Teaching 

After Falk, Greenwald attended The Ellis School in Pittsburgh and earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill. Throughout college, "I studied abroad every opportunity that I had, including a program through Pitt,” she shares. “I was able to do summer anthropology classes in Havana, Cuba, an archaeological dig in Peru, and I spent my junior year in Seville, Spain.”

Following graduation, she spent one year teaching in a Spanish-immersion preschool before moving to New York and pursuing a master’s in education through NYC Teaching Fellows. During the program, “I was working in a dual language school—a school that does everything 50-50 in English and Spanish. I started as a fifth-grade teacher, and then after four years, I went back to school, and I got a master's in library science and became the school’s first librarian.” 

Later, during the pandemic, Greenwald moved back home to Pittsburgh, and in 2024, she returned to Falk as a seventh- and eighth-grade Spanish teacher.

Greenwald sitting on the famous Falk turtle, which now stands at the front door 

Full-Circle Moments 

During her time in New York City, Greenwald reconnected with Erin Sparling—a fellow Falk alum and her now-husband—when a mutual friend visited from Japan and invited them out to watch a Steelers game. Despite the one-year age gap, Greenwald says they knew each other from shared classes, including a third- and fourth-grade blend and Greg Wittig’s homeroom in Middle School. By the time they moved back to Pittsburgh in 2020, Greenwald and Sparling were married with two children, both of whom now attend Falk. 

Living in Pittsburgh and being a faculty member, Greenwald says her life is constantly filled with full-circle moments like this. For one thing, "Frankie, the [friend] who lived in Japan, was actually my neighbor growing up, and now we both live back in Regent Square, three doors apart, and our children are the same age, and they play together all the time.” Greenwald’s best friend Kate—the one who co-starred with her in Wittig's production of “Much Ado About Nothing”—also lives in the area and has a son at Falk, plus two daughters at Ellis. To this day, the two remain close, as do their children.

Greenwald, Kate (Davis) Booker, and their Falk kids together in Mexico

This past school year, Greenwald also taught a handful of second-generation Falk students whose parents she knew growing up. On top of that, Greg Wittig has gone from being one of her most impactful teachers to one of her most respected colleagues. "I enjoy reminiscing,” she says, “but also seeing how he's continued to develop his practice and educational philosophy, from my experience at the start of his career, [to] now as a veteran teacher.”