The Best Teacher I Ever Had - My Aunt Margaret

My Aunt Margaret passed away last night at the age of 92. If you attended Forest High School in Forest, Mississippi anytime from 1949 to 1979, Mrs. Richardson probably taught you. That's right, she taught American History, World History, Government and Civics for 32 1/2 years. (If you want to think in terms of Presidents, she taught through the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter.)

She not only taught me and my brother Bob, she also taught her two sons and each of her own three sisters. I think I can speak for all of my relatives when I say that being related to Mrs. Richardson didn't buy me a drop of sympathy in her class. She took no prisoners and she didn't play.

Yet she never raised her voice or got angry, ever. Her class was strictly business from bell to bell. I remember each day she had excruciatingly long sentences and questions written on the chalkboard in her pristine, textbook cursive. You had to copy it down fast because she hit the ground running. Everything was important: what she had written and what she was saying. (I still have my American History notes in a notebook as big as a moderately-sized city phonebook.) You didn't have time to clown. Even the kids who were notorious for misbehaving in school straightened up and flew right in her class.

I've earned three college degrees, two of them graduate degrees. I can't think of a teacher that was more of a professional than my aunt. I never, ever saw her frustrated, shaken, at a loss for words, unprepared or in any way less than stellar. She knew her stuff and she expected the same from you. The only time I can even remember a mistake at all was when she ended her lesson one day just a bit before the lunch bell. "We're stopping 30 seconds early," she said, looking at the clock that sat on her desk. "We'll have to cut our lunch period short by 30 seconds to make up for it. Be prepared." And that's exactly what we did.

If you wanted an "A" in Mrs. Richardson's class you could ace every test, participate in class and turn in your homework, but that still wasn't gonna cut it. You were also required (every six weeks) to write an article review (from American Heritage or some similar magazine/journal) AND do a book report. Every six weeks. And these weren't fluff books or simple book reports. We're talking The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich type of stuff. Every six weeks.

And of course your test papers could contain no errors, none, not if you wanted an A+. Misspell a word? Forget it. You're toast. It had to be perfect.

Aunt Margaret had extremely high standards, but once you left her class, you were ready for just about anything that any teacher could throw at you. I can't tell you the number of people that came up to me later in life and said that nobody prepared them for college coursework better than Mrs. Richardson. Other people told me that no one had ever made them work that hard for anything. And every one of them loved her for it.

At home, Aunt Margaret was mostly quiet and reserved, but that inner strength was always present. She loved to laugh and always wanted to know how we were all doing as we grew older. She's one of the main reasons I became a teacher. And I think there's something of her still in me that comes out when I realize I'm not working quite as hard as I should, that I'm not giving 100%, or that I'm trying to cut corners, even a little bit. She took no excuses and never compromised. She pushed you to your personal limit, but when you finished her class, you knew you had accomplished something. Boy, do we need teachers like that now. Not only teachers, we need leaders like that in all walks of life. I'll certainly miss you, Aunt Margaret. Thank you for everything.