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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
June 30 - July 6, 2005 Edition
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Colleagues June 30, 2005 By Doug Cabral Alternating cheers and tears, West Tisbury School faculty parted with three of their longest-serving professional colleagues Monday. In sum, Martha Stackpole, Joel Weintraub, and Dick Goodell have been teachers nearly 100 years, most of the time together at West Tisbury. Dick is a wiry, energetic, carefully organized teacher executing a curriculum painstakingly assembled, pruned, and polished over decades. He has also been the school’s vice principal and disciplinarian and its guidance counselor, but mostly he’s been a fifth grade teacher devoted to long division, the states and their capitals, the capitals of Europe, multiplication, and leading like an eager jackrabbit the annual fifth grade assault on Mount Monadnock. Dick knows what’s important for his kids, and what’s not. Pat Kelly, Dick’s fellow fifth grade teacher, said that on the mountain-climbing trip, Dick’s one rule was, Don’t let them sleep after climbing. We want them to crawl into their tents ready to go to sleep. This year, on the way to the camp from the mountain, Pat says it was Dick who fell asleep in the car. (Still, he may not have retired from this last bit of his curriculum, by the way. He’s got quite a few more uphill years in him.) Joel is a science teacher who is also a born entertainer. His mordant slant matches his gift for speaking a funny, ironic language that catches the attention of his students, and then inspires a look of surprise and amusement, which is usually followed by dawning comprehension. Karl Nelson, a science teacher who described Joel as his mentor, said that when unexpected visitors made what was typically an unwelcome appearance in Joel’s science class, Joel would explain the visitor by saying, All the women are after me. When his turn came to speak Monday, Joel took a slip of paper from his pocket on which he said he had made of list of colleagues to thank for their help over the years, Karl twice. Then Joel read off the names and ended, saying, “I bought cars from them.” Joel likes to get everything he can get from a vehicle. Martha, leaving behind a career of second and third graders who will never have had a more comforting, perceptive, and professionally devoted educator, is every colleague’s and parent’s nominee for best in show. Reading and language teacher Madi Coutts read a poem she’d written in Martha’s honor. In it, the several new programs designed over the years to make teaching reading to youngsters a cinch barely escaped being reduced to the status of bad limericks, not likely to be appreciated by a teacher who knew her stuff frontwards and backwards. None of the three appears to be of retirement age, but their teaching careers began early in their working lives, and their children are mostly grown now, many of them in college or through it and with families of their own. One of Dick’s grandchildren asked him why he was retiring just as the child was about to become one of Dick’s long line of students. Why not wait a year? But Dick said, if I waited for you, I’d have to wait for the next grandchild and the next, and I would be here another 10 years. His decision was taken and not about to be unmade. None of these retiring teachers is going very far, except for Joel, who always defies categorization. He will spend part of next winter in a house on Ireland’s west coast. Joel’s Irish wife, the high school teacher Elaine Weintraub, grew up there, and now Joel has installed central heating to replace the peat-burning fireplace whose efficiency, to hear him tell it, never amounted to more than a scientific hypothesis. Dick’s wife is a trained nurse whose career has not run its course yet, so for the time being Dick will send his wife off to the office in the morning with a cheery wave, and Patty will return each evening with a cheery question, “What have you made us for dinner?” And then of course, there are all his children and grandchildren. Martha will make a new plan for a new career. Husband Matthew, director of the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, maintains a hectic working pace, so Martha expects to have plenty of free time to try something new. Monday, it was not just colleagues celebrating departing colleagues. It was neighbors saluting neighbors, neighbors who had been parents together, who had vacationed and partied and golfed, and gone to weddings and wakes together, whose slightly older children babysat for a colleague’s slightly younger ones. Michael Halt, the West Tisbury School principal, now in his second year, is a young man for whom retirement can be no more than a fleshless concept. He was master of ceremonies for Monday’s gathering, which had the air of a family get together. As much as they have come to admire Michael Halt, the three honored guests have each of them known three or four of his principal predecessors. It’s a long line, which may be significant, but probably is not, especially when compared to the long line of students who’ve been safely committed to the care of these three teachers and been rewarded for it. |
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