in memoriam: Maggie Ellison

You’ve never heard of her, but she was my Sophomore English teacher in high school, and I liked her a great deal. She died yesterday at 67. I guess that means she was 39 when I had her for Sophomore English. At any rate, I was shocked to hear that she was 67, but the numbers show that that’s how long it’s actually been. 1983-84 was when I was in her class, and much water has obviously passed under the bridge since then. I wasn’t even into philosophy yet, for example.

Maggie was unusually energetic as a teacher and even more so as a theater director (she had taught theater at the college level before agreeing to take the high school job). I can still visualize her classroom perfectly, and the one reading I remember most clearly from that class was Death of a Salesman.

As a teacher, you really have a great deal of power. People remember you a lot more than you think they do, and I mean hundreds and hundreds of people– more people than you can possibly remember yourself. There’s a certain “star” quality to teachers that they never think they have, but which they do have in the eyes of their students as long as they’re not absolutely terrible.

I last saw Maggie in January 2003, I believe, while walking through my old high school one afternoon and running into her randomly. It had been 17 years and of course she looked older, but otherwise it was the same person and the same sort of conversation as when I was a high school kid.