23 June 2003 - 11:34 a.m.

Like so many strong women, her story was told in her eyes, brightly blue and shining amid dark hair hanging to the waist. You were eleven, twelve and passing a note, say, or chewing gum or, among the worst offenses, saying "yeah" when you should have said "yes" and you know you messed up and could only look upward at the head of the room and see those eyes waiting to meet yours, professing your doom and subsequent shame without anyone having to say a word.

Or maybe it was disappointment. Those eyes could be let down so easily and make you feel rightly awful for having caused them this, forcing you to work harder to make them shine again, to crease the lines laterally around them and raise the wide cheekbones into a smile of pride, a laugh of success and bright futures.

She had an oversized poster of RFK on the wall, a black-and-white three-quarter profile of the sunny lad grinning with "KENNEDY" written above in purple or magenta letters. She not only taught us about John Lennon but showed us why he was important in the tones her voice took when speaking of him. We understood through her that one of life's hardest truths is the early and unfair deaths of our heroes.

If she didn't teach me how to read she taught me why to read and why to love it. If she didn't teach me common sense she showed me its importance. If she didn't raise me as a parent she singlehandedly somethinged— what is this slippery important verb here that sums up everything a sixth-grade teacher can do for a kid looking for direction? the word encompassing "teaching" but also "shaping" and "sculpting" and "influencing" and "guiding" and ... well, mentored it must be, or at least mentored is the best I can do for now—mentored me to grow up into the person I am, the person with a strong and unbreakable pull toward learning, with a devout faith in education's power and promise.

She deserves more than I'm giving her here, distractedly in an office and over a shoddy, unfit medium. She deserves more than flowers and sentiment. She deserves books written about and for and to her. She deserves canonization. She deserves the voices of the children she's taught raised upward together, singing out for the losses they'll now feel in her absence.

If anything, she deserves to be remembered. Please try.