Thanks to all the great Mac teachers …

We often postpone saying positive things about people, especially about our teachers.  In high school, our teachers could be the height of “uncool,”  especially the ladies wearing long skirts and men wearing white socks and flood pants!   They hadn’t changed their hairstyles in 10-20 years, and they had standards we scoffed at.  But what probably most of us did not realize at the time was the level of excellence in teaching they were handing out to us.  Were many of them tough and demanding?   Absolutely.  Did we work our behinds off?  Absolutely.  Did we sometimes cry over math problems we could not work, and research papers we wondered how on earth we would ever complete?  I did.

The payoff to all that hard work we were put through was not apparent for many years.  I breezed through the University of Texas at Austin.  It was a long time before I realized why.  My high school years were so rigorous that college was no different and sometimes easier.  I was programmed to work and study and that is exactly what I did.  A lot of other UT freshman flunked out.  It was just business as usual for us.  Quite a few Mac people (Diane Shisk, Layne Summers, Debby Large) entered UT with over 20 hours of college credit, almost a year.  I only had 17 hours, which was pretty low compared to my peers.

Today in education, one of the buzzwords is “lifelong learners.”  We are trying to make our students into lifelong learners, not just people who come to school and learn only what they have to.  Mac teachers positively made me into a lifelong learner.  I still “ingest” books, sometimes at the rate of 2-3 per week, mostly history and biography.  My interest is still continually piqued by different subjects which I seek out and explore.

The following is a list of teachers I would like to specifically thank.  Please feel free to add on your own favorites!

Coach Moseley taught us world history as freshmen.  We started at the cradle of written history between the Tigris and Euphrates River.  We covered Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Rome, the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, Charlamagne, Henry the Eighth and the splintering of the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther, Napoleon.  I knew next to nothing about any of that until Coach sat in front of class and read to us out of this little paperback history book.  It must have been a great little book, because that’s all he ever used.  We pretty much ignored the textbook, if we even had one.  Hearing about all of these characters was a new dawn to me.  They still and always will fascinate me.

Mrs. Virginia Peak taught us to WRITE.  No list of great Mac teachers is complete without Virginia Peak at or near the top.  She was relentless in hammering those skills into us.  Papers were returned bloody with her red editing marks.  We had to correct everything to her standards, twice if the first rewrite was not good enough.  And then there were the “common errors”, the misuse of there, their, and they’re and the difference between well and good, for example.  I still cringe when I see these misused and have had to straighten out our district webmaster once or twice when an error appeared on the district website.  Mrs. Peak was one of the driest characters in the school.  We were never sure if she even liked us, but she probably did.  She would call us barbarians and she had the thankless job of raising us up to a higher standard.

Miss Joann Ryan was also an excellent writing teacher, but her true calling was bringing literature to life.  Remember studying Shakespeare which was akin to pulling teeth without anesthetics, or reading a foreign language?  Then there were those puns and “asides” that were supposed to be so funny.  Most of us sat there with our mouths hanging open trying to figure out the humor.  That’s what happens when you sit there and just read Shakespeare.  Miss Ryan changed all of that for us.  We were studying Julius Caesar I believe when we walked into her class and saw a record player on her desk.  When we were ready, she produced a recording of Julius Caesar dramatized with Richard Burton as one of the leads!  What a difference to sit there and listen to the drama as performed by professional actors!  Was this really Shakespeare?  A door had been opened.  Shakespeare was meant to be performed, not read!  Later in the year when we were studying Hamlet, Miss Ryan announced that PBS was broadcasting the play that evening with Richard Chamberlain as Hamlet and she wanted us to watch it.  Like most high school students, I though Hamlet was bloody boring until I watched that program.  I came close to bursting into tears at the end.  Poor Miss Ryan really was passionate about her literature.  When we were studying Milton (the blind guy who wrote Paradise Lost), one of the class smart alecks raised his hand and asked Miss Ryan how did Milton manage to write poetry if he was blind?  Did he use Braille?  She flew into a rage, threw her book across her desk, sat down and pouted for about five minutes before she could gather herself back up and continue the lesson as if nothing had happened.  Boy did we keep our mouths shut after that.

Mrs. Odelia Moynihan and Miss Pamela Griffis grounded me in the French language.  Because of Senorita Barrera, I was still snobbish about not learning Spanish, and my mother’s family was of French descent, so I welcomed the opportunity to study that language.  We really didn’t know how good we were, even when we took “Sweepstakes” or first prize for total number of points earned at these huge Symposiums of French language students held city wide every year.  I entered UT with all of my language requirements completed by advanced placement and took a junior level French literature class where our professor lectured only in French, we read all of our Voltaire in French, discussed it in class and wrote papers in French.  Couldn’t have done it without Mrs. Moynihan and Miss Griffis.  Those two also led a group of students all over Europe every summer for six weeks.  My parents did not have the money for me to go during high school, but I pledged to get there as soon as I could and I finally made it in 1978.

The art of the research paper, complete with footnotes and bibliography, was taught to us as sophomores by Mrs. Tyson .  This was truly the most difficult class I ever went through and the most singularly demanding teacher I ever had.  She was actually teaching us on the “gifted” level but we didn’t even know what that was.  Her class was just HARD.  But as we learned one day, she also had respect for us and was willing to listen.  The class was totally numb with the amount of work we had been assigned and the timeline:  a ten-page TYPED research paper (could any of us even type??) complete with footnotes and a bibliography due in one month, with a first draft to be prepared within two weeks.  Becky Lane was a brave little soul.  At the beginning of class, her hand went up and she respectfully but honestly expressed all of our frustration to Mrs. Tyson at the workload she had assigned.  All of us stopped breathing.  We expected Becky Lane to go flying out the door and into the hall with Mrs. Tyson’s footprint in her behind.  But instead, Mrs. Tyson listened carefully.  Then she opened her teacher’s calendar and quietly studied it for a few minutes.  She then totally rearranged the assignment and cut it in half.  Some of us felt like crying with relief.  We could have kissed Becky’s feet, but we were also stunned that a teacher had listened to us and shown respect for our wants and needs.

Mr. Sydney King’s algebra 2 class nearly broke me, but sometimes when you break, you can come back stronger than before.  Math was never my best subject, but I can limp along in it better than most people.   Algebra was especially difficult for me.  My grades in his class started at a C, then dropped to a D, and then my Christmas present was an F for that six weeks.  I was devastated.  Mr. King bravely tutored me.  I would go to his office for help, and I would understand for just a glimmer, but as soon as I walked out the door, all knowledge departed.  I just could not get it.  My crowd was abandoning his class by the droves and transferring into another much easier class.  What was I waiting for?  I asked my mother to write the request and presented it to Miss Boyle.  I started attending  the new “joke” class, watched the other students sleep, and the teacher nearly hacking and coughing himself to death every day.  The poor man.  A lot of students were convinced he was going to pass away in the middle of class, and what would they do?  After about two days I had had enough.  I asked my mother for a note putting me back in Sydney King’s class and presented it to Miss Boyle.  She looked at me like I was crazy.  When I returned to Mr. King, he never said a word and certainly didn’t lower his standards of teaching for me.  I dragged my grade back up to a C for the next six weeks, then a B and finally an A!!  My year average was probably a C, but I could have cared less.  I had passed.  To this day, I am not sure why I returned to his class.  It was probably one of those passages we go all through where we emerge on a slightly higher plane.