John Barrow: “today on National Teacher Day, I want to encourage all my constituents and my colleagues to take just a minute to thank…”

“today on National Teacher Day, I want to encourage all my constituents and my colleagues to take just a minute to thank those teachers who helped us get where we are today, sometimes despite ourselves. For me those teachers included Ms. Moseley, Ms. Goodwyn, Ms. Rapley, Ms. Hughes, and a host of others. But the teacher I want to single out is Ms. Bertha Musick. She just celebrated her 96th birthday, and she is still going strong. She was my 11th grade English teacher, and she was tough as nails. Every day it was her job to hammer an understanding and an appreciation of good English into the heads of an 11th grade class full of thick- skulled teenagers. Ms. Musick meant business. And while she had a reputation for being tough, every one of her students came to realize that her toughness was driven by her devotion. Many of us understood that at the time. All of us came to understand it over time. {time} 1945 I cannot tell my colleagues how many times I have heard her describe how former students, who used to think of her as the enemy, came back to her, sometimes many years later, to thank her for being caring enough to be tough. Not just caring enough about her work, but caring enough about her students; and they were right. Someone once defined an education as what you remember after you forget 99 percent of what you learned in school. What Ms. Musick taught me, and hundreds of other impressionable youngsters, is the value of not giving in and not giving up.…”