National Teacher's Day 2012

May 11, 2012 National Teacher’s Day

For all the teachers & professors & mentors I have been privileged to encounter, my thanks, appreciation, admiration & respect.

To Mrs. Hammond of Cabell Elementary, who was the first teacher to read something I wrote to a class.

To Mrs. Burnam of Putnam Elementary, who nominated me for everything & made my year in seventh grade so much fun.

To Mrs. Moore of Morehead Middle School, who recommended me for honors English & changed the direction of my life.

For Nancy “Lucy” Leavitt of Coronado High School, who warned me to monitor the “perpetual motion machine” otherwise known as my mouth.

For David Cohen of Coronado High School, who read my essay on Woodstock out loud & announced that I was a writer.

For Charlotte Moore of Dulles High School, who was the first person to give me less than a perfect score on an essay.  An A, but not perfect.  Charlotte Moore taught with a standard of excellence that allowed every college bound student to succeed in university English courses.  

To Patsy Kay Kelly McGinnis of Dulles High School, who, after reading our first assignment in Composition class, stopped me at the classroom door & asked:  You do know that you have a very unique style?

Of course, I had no idea what she meant.  I was seventeen.  At the end of the year, she told me:  I have this vision of you writing children’s books.

Maybe because she recognized that even then, I thought I was seven.

To Dr. James Cleghorn, who recommended in a creative writing class that we all needed to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude & opened up a whole new world of literature for me.

To Dr. Patricia Lee Yongue, who gave me Cather & mentored & supported me & introduced me to a different way of reading & thinking.  Who convinced me that there is validity in a fractal rather than a linear approach to reading.

To Dr. Julia Saville, who gave me Middlemarch & was the first to gently suggest that I was a bit verbose.

To Dr. Charlotte Berkowitz, the always extemporaneously eloquent Charlotte, who inspired me to strive to be so much more than I can ever hope to be.

To Dr. Linda Westervelt, who began class one day with Ms. Ettinger, I hear through the grapevine that you have very strong ideas about this novel.  Please enlighten us.

And unleashed a monster.

To Dr. Roberta Weldon, who wrote on one of my papers:  You write with a clarity & grace unusual in an undergraduate.  Unaware that it was not my first rodeo.

To Dr. John McNamara, who assigned James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.   Which reaffirmed my belief that Virginia Woolfe was the greater artist & writer.

To Dr. Lorraine Stock, whose passion for Chaucer did not diminish from the first course I took from her to the second course fifteen years later.  And who introduced me to the Sheela na Gigs.

To Dr. Charles Dove, a very close reader, who always gave me a reading list after every paper.   And taught me about Roland Barthe’s braid . . .  not to mention The Purloined Poe.

To Dr. Ann Christenson, who made me fall in love with the Renaissance & introduced the concept of how architecture & space play out in literature.  Who taught me the importance of peer review & peer collaboration in the classroom.   And that thresholds represent the possibility of transgression or transformation.

To Dr. David Mazella, aka “Dr. Dave”, who never convinced me of the glories of Lawrence Sterne, but challenged me to compete against myself & taught me that a classroom is a collaborative effort.  

As is life, Dr. Dave.  

And to my contemporaries who chose to teach:  Cheryl Reese Green, Judy Bennett Prasatik, David Wizig, Tracy Thibodaux Spruce, Betsy Kerr Davis, Dr. Mary Frances Agnello . . . and I am sure many more.

And to those that teach outside the classroom.

To my mother who gave me a spiritual center.  To my daddy who allowed me to think for myself.  To my sister who inspires me with her voice & faith.  To my brother John who shared with me the joy & wonder of his children.  To my brother Jason, who reminds me I am not the smartest one in the family.

And to my sons, the greatest teachers of all.  The best work of which I have only had a very small part.

Thank you.