Last week, I learned from a reader’s email that my beloved high school U.S. history and government teacher, Rosalie Mackay, passed away on June 23.
Miss Mackay spent her career teaching in Provo, Utah, first at Farrer Junior High School and then at Timpview High School. She taught for so long that she actually taught my mom in the 1970s before she taught me in the early aughts. She was a tiny woman who told us on the first day of class that we were not allowed to wear perfume because she was allergic. But she was not frail. If anything, she was formidable. No one misbehaved in her classroom. They wouldn’t dare.
Miss Mackay’s classes were advanced placement. Enrolling in her classes meant a student could count on passing the U.S. history or government AP test at the end of the year with at least a score of 4. Maybe 5. Miss Mackay taught the required material inside and out with sharply honed expertise, and so long as they did the required assignments, her students completed her class knowing every fact and figure related to the founding and functioning of the American political system.
But it wasn’t the remarkably high AP test pass rate or the thoroughness of her lesson materials that endeared her students to her. It was her ability to imbue in them an understanding of why those lessons mattered in their lives as young Americans.
Not a day goes by that I don’t think about something I learned in Miss Mackay’s classroom. There are times when I think about her lessons for obvious reasons — caucus night, Election Day, significant Supreme Court rulings and congressional votes. I awaken like a sleeper cell and I surprise myself with my knowledge and ability to recite all the procedural rules and oddities that keep our systems in check. Because Miss Mackay drilled those procedural rules and oddities into the heads of me and my fellow students over and over via the worksheets and quizzes and study guides she used and refined for decades.
Some days, I think about the lessons she taught in more abstract ways. Like when I’m traveling along a highway that was constructed as part of the New Deal or when the price of gas rises or when a neighbor runs for the school board. Everything about living in America reminds me about something I learned in Miss Mackay’s classroom. Everything I love about living in America reminds me of her.
I think what left the biggest impression on me, though, was Miss Mackay’s expectation for excellence.
A line from her obituary reads, “Rosalie found great satisfaction in helping students recognize their potential for success.” As her students, we felt that every day in her class. And not just as a group, but on an individual level. She wanted, and expected, every student to succeed. And success didn’t just mean getting a good grade. It meant intellectually flourishing.
There was nothing more important to Miss Mackay than staying on task, but she left plenty of room for questions, and even sometimes debate. I remember heated arguments over Title IX, communist principles, and what exactly makes someone a conservative or a liberal. Miss Mackay entertained these discussions without pedantry, and treated her classroom full of sometimes ill-informed children as respected intellectuals, which in turn made us act like respected intellectuals. Most of the time.
We, her and I, once got into a heated debate over the definition of the word “several.” She thought it meant a few, I thought it meant more than a few (and still do). The definition of the word determined whether or not I would lose a point on the homework assignment we were grading. One point out of many, many points over the semester. If I were the teacher, I would tell me to minus that point and get over it. It would not affect my grade even a little.
But not Miss Mackay. She understood how important that single point was to a nerd like me, and after a lengthy back and forth with the whole class chiming in, she gave me the point.
I would not blame Miss Mackay if she did not remember me. I was one of hundreds, maybe thousands of students she taught over her career. But also, it would not surprise me if she remembered every single one of us, because that’s how much she seemed to care. And I have no doubt we all remember her and the impact she left on our feelings about our country and about ourselves.