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In memoriam
Jul. 25th, 2007 12:30 amJuanita Ponte, longtime languages teacher at Boston Latin School, dead at age 62
This is hitting me pretty hard. Ms. Ponte was one of my favorite teachers from high school, although there were times back then when you'd never have heard those words pass my lips. It's... well, complicated.
I had Ms. Ponte for three years back at BLS. When I first had her, back in tenth grade non-honors Spanish, I hated her. Ms. Ponte did not have a particularly kind attitude. She was extremely strict and refused to tolerate any behavior that she considered inappropriate, and although that certainly included straight rudeness, it also tended to include students who had been inadvertently inconsiderate or disruptive. She was also an extraordinarily brilliant woman who had little patience for those who weren't as brilliant as she; that's a quality that's better suited to a career teaching at Latin, the premier public exam school in Boston, than it would be to any other public school in Boston, but she still tended to be dismissive and sometimes mocking towards students who didn't catch on quickly. She wasn't a teacher who reached out to struggling students and helped them to achieve; she was a teacher who demanded that they achieve and more or less dismissed them if they didn't. She wasn't going to sit down with you and have a warm discussion about your life and how you could do better in her classes. If you wanted to do better, you needed to do the work. Period. The great majority of students at BLS thought she was a complete bitch, mostly because she seemed to dislike students by default and then later warm to the ones who proved themselves to her. These are not traits that lead to a teacher being well-loved among students, and she wasn't.
The first year I studied with her I initially wanted out of her class, even asked the assistant headmaster, who I was kind of buddy-buddy with, to transfer me out. The assistant headmaster said oh, she's terrible to her students, but she's a very good teacher. She refused to transfer me out. From where I sit now, I'm very glad she refused.
Because I learned in Ms. Ponte's classes. Of all the teachers I ever had, she was the teacher who challenged me the most and taught me the most. That first year, most of the students who were proficient in languages were in the honors class, and she did not like teaching a non-honors class, for reasons that should be clear from the first paragraph. But she taught. Oh boy, did she teach. I have never had a teacher who taught so effectively and so flawlessly. She designed her assignments very carefully to teach all aspects of the language, and it worked. We studied out of the standard text, of course, but the tests she devised were challenging in just the right way: in order to pass those tests, you had to really know the language - no shortcuts, no rote memorization, you had to internalize the material - and if you'd done well on a test, that meant you knew your stuff. We worked beyond the textbook as well: we read from the works of notable Spanish-language authors, provided the language was simple enough for students at our level to grasp. We had monthly oral presentations in which we would find a news story pertaining to a Spanish-speaking country and tell the class about it in Spanish. We did a Spanish-language video presentation. This was all way beyond what most teachers at BLS did. Many, many of the teachers there relied on the fact that their students were smart and were going to do well on all the standardized tests no matter what, and those teachers would cut corners in their teaching. There were some teachers who were creative and some who taught from the textbook and some who didn't teach at all and figured their students would scrape on through. But I never had another teacher who was as good at what she did as Ms. Ponte. The woman taught.
At the end of my first year with her she approached me and asked me to be in her Spanish honors/AP class, a two-year commitment. I accepted. That became the best course I ever took at BLS. We studied Spanish literature by Borges, Lorca, Garcia Marquez, Ana Maria Matute, and Miguel de Unamuno. The authors were selected by the AP curriculum but the rest was up to the teacher. She did a phenomenal job of teaching those authors. She was a brilliant woman who loved Spanish literature, and of all the AP courses I took at BLS that is the only one that I found to be truly college-level - and when I say college-level, I mean that the way she presented the material would not have been amiss at the college I later attended, which was Harvard. I don't know why she ever became a high school teacher when there is no doubt in my mind that she could have been a great college professor, but it was to the gain of her AP students for sure. She was so intellectually involved with the material; her excitement and passion were clear when she'd be delving into some of the finer philosophical points of Borges or Unamuno. She was one of the best poetry teachers I've had in any language. And with the honors class, in a direct 180 from the way she'd been with the non-honors class, she was patient. She'd work with the class until we understood the themes of the work, but she'd never give us an interpretation flat-out; she worked with us to try to help us develop our own perspectives. Given that we were studying authors who are challenging when read in one's native language, teaching them so well was no small feat. I still remember the class she taught on Garcia Marquez's short story "Monologo de Isabel viendo llover en Macondo" (translated in the collection Leaf Storm as "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo"). In English, it's not one of his better-known short stories - I don't know about in Spanish. But I just remember studying it under her guidance and being drawn into the eerie, compelling atmosphere of the story. I remember her talking at the end of the class about how the story haunted her. I remember being haunted by it too. And, in general, there is no other class from which I have retained so much of the material as I did from that class. There is no other teacher from whom I learned so much. At BLS I studied four languages (including English) under dozens of teachers, and she set the standard that no one else could quite meet.
I warmed to her over the years, as she did towards me. She warmed towards several of the students in the class, really; I wasn't the only one who liked her in that class. Yet she was never going to be a kindly teacher you'd run to in times of trouble: I remember one day I was at the school after hours, and she was working in her classroom, and I had nowhere in particular to go so I asked if I could sit in her classroom until my appointment a little later. I was shocked and hurt by the vehemence with which she said no, absolutely not, there are plenty of unlocked classrooms in this building and you don't need to sit here. Of course I didn't; I just liked her and didn't see the harm. But that wasn't the way she was. Her passion was for the teaching, not for the students. You had to take that for what it was.
I think part of the reason I was drawn to her was her brilliance. Why was she teaching high school? As her obituary notes, she was fluent in four languages. Her intellectual acuity was razor-sharp; she was as brainy as anyone I've met, and I have spent a large portion of my life being overawed by other people's brilliance. And I've always found her fascinating as a woman who made some pretty trailblazing achievements. She was the first female teacher to teach at BLS - it was an all-male school for both students and teachers for a very long time. I can imagine what it must have been like to be the first female to join the old boys' club that Latin School had been, especially given BLS's complacently prideful attitude towards its history and traditions (it's the oldest public school in the country, and it spends a great deal of time telling you how many signers of the Declaration of Independence went there. Got a BFF relationship with Harvard, claims Harvard was founded initially to give BLS students somewhere to go. You get the idea.) I imagine she pissed a lot of people off, because she just did not stand down or give in to anybody when she knew she was right, and she was smart enough that that was most of the time. The obituary gives the teachers' and the administration's perspective n that.
This is getting really long, and I know it's not that interesting. But here's a final thing I want to say, which will sound really bitchy initially, but it ties in to a lot of what I want to say here. Six months ago or so another longtime BLS teacher died, Inez Middleton. Ms. Middleton was a teacher who was beloved by the students. She was the polar opposite of Ms. Ponte (I always found it amusing that their classrooms were directly across the hall from one another): she took the students in as family, listened to their troubles, counseled them. She spent a lot of class time talking about sex and drugs in ways that teens could relate to. And when she died there was a tremendous outpouring of grief from the students: scholarships started in her name, Facebook memorial groups up the wazoo. The only problem with Ms. Middleton is that she didn't teach. I had a lot of issues with Ms. Middleton, which I'm not going to get into because my point here is not to rag on a dead woman who was well-loved by so many people, but here is the one that's relevant here: she did not teach. She didn't read most of the books she assigned (representative question aimed at the class, taken from the unit on Tess of the D'Urbervilles: "So... what do you think, did Tess get raped?" Asked because she sincerely didn't know.) She didn't know her subject and her classes were generally not English classes so much as a free-for-all for students to talk about whatever they wanted to. And that's valuable, I know - many students will testify that she helped them not to slip through the cracks, which is huge and deserving of every word of love and gratitude ever spoken to and of her. But I feel like it's teachers like Ms. Middleton who get all the credit for being good teachers (she'd won tons and tons of teaching awards), because students love those teachers. And Ms. Ponte was not widely loved by her students, and her death is not going to receive the outpouring of grief and heartfelt sentiment that Ms. Middleton's did. And that is what it is. But I wanted to write about Ms. Ponte; I wanted to say the things that are on my mind about this woman who taught me so much and inspired me to delve more deeply into literature and to love the authors she loved. I don't want to idealize her, but I wanted to talk about her. I wanted someone, maybe, to know her as I knew her. Not very well; I never knew her as a woman, only as a teacher. But she was an extraordinary teacher. Although I know this entry will be skimmed by most and dismissed as boring by many others, I really just wanted to say it. She's a teacher who left a deep impression on me and whom I will always remember.
I am feeling very sad right now. I have thought of her so often in the years since I graduated high school - I've never lost the passion for Spanish literature that she instilled in me - that I had more than once considered writing her a letter to tell her what her classes had meant to me, because I suspect she didn't get a lot of letters like that. I never got around to it, and now she's dead. People, if any of you are stalling on doing something like that, please do it now. It really, really sucks to know that I could have written her a letter that would have given her a moment of happiness in the months when she was so ill and that I didn't get around to it. I have had little exposure to death in my life, no one really close to me has died, and this is hitting me hard - the first time I've really experienced the reality that sometimes people die before you get to tell them what they meant to you.
"Rest in peace" seems a terribly facile thing to say. It says in her obituary that she was a devout Catholic. I hope that in death she has found that whatever ultimate meaning she sought in her religion is real and true. I hope... I don't know what I hope. Only, selfishly, that she knew on some level what she'd meant to me and to other students who cared about her. I hope someone else wrote her the letter that I didn't write.
This is hitting me pretty hard. Ms. Ponte was one of my favorite teachers from high school, although there were times back then when you'd never have heard those words pass my lips. It's... well, complicated.
I had Ms. Ponte for three years back at BLS. When I first had her, back in tenth grade non-honors Spanish, I hated her. Ms. Ponte did not have a particularly kind attitude. She was extremely strict and refused to tolerate any behavior that she considered inappropriate, and although that certainly included straight rudeness, it also tended to include students who had been inadvertently inconsiderate or disruptive. She was also an extraordinarily brilliant woman who had little patience for those who weren't as brilliant as she; that's a quality that's better suited to a career teaching at Latin, the premier public exam school in Boston, than it would be to any other public school in Boston, but she still tended to be dismissive and sometimes mocking towards students who didn't catch on quickly. She wasn't a teacher who reached out to struggling students and helped them to achieve; she was a teacher who demanded that they achieve and more or less dismissed them if they didn't. She wasn't going to sit down with you and have a warm discussion about your life and how you could do better in her classes. If you wanted to do better, you needed to do the work. Period. The great majority of students at BLS thought she was a complete bitch, mostly because she seemed to dislike students by default and then later warm to the ones who proved themselves to her. These are not traits that lead to a teacher being well-loved among students, and she wasn't.
The first year I studied with her I initially wanted out of her class, even asked the assistant headmaster, who I was kind of buddy-buddy with, to transfer me out. The assistant headmaster said oh, she's terrible to her students, but she's a very good teacher. She refused to transfer me out. From where I sit now, I'm very glad she refused.
Because I learned in Ms. Ponte's classes. Of all the teachers I ever had, she was the teacher who challenged me the most and taught me the most. That first year, most of the students who were proficient in languages were in the honors class, and she did not like teaching a non-honors class, for reasons that should be clear from the first paragraph. But she taught. Oh boy, did she teach. I have never had a teacher who taught so effectively and so flawlessly. She designed her assignments very carefully to teach all aspects of the language, and it worked. We studied out of the standard text, of course, but the tests she devised were challenging in just the right way: in order to pass those tests, you had to really know the language - no shortcuts, no rote memorization, you had to internalize the material - and if you'd done well on a test, that meant you knew your stuff. We worked beyond the textbook as well: we read from the works of notable Spanish-language authors, provided the language was simple enough for students at our level to grasp. We had monthly oral presentations in which we would find a news story pertaining to a Spanish-speaking country and tell the class about it in Spanish. We did a Spanish-language video presentation. This was all way beyond what most teachers at BLS did. Many, many of the teachers there relied on the fact that their students were smart and were going to do well on all the standardized tests no matter what, and those teachers would cut corners in their teaching. There were some teachers who were creative and some who taught from the textbook and some who didn't teach at all and figured their students would scrape on through. But I never had another teacher who was as good at what she did as Ms. Ponte. The woman taught.
At the end of my first year with her she approached me and asked me to be in her Spanish honors/AP class, a two-year commitment. I accepted. That became the best course I ever took at BLS. We studied Spanish literature by Borges, Lorca, Garcia Marquez, Ana Maria Matute, and Miguel de Unamuno. The authors were selected by the AP curriculum but the rest was up to the teacher. She did a phenomenal job of teaching those authors. She was a brilliant woman who loved Spanish literature, and of all the AP courses I took at BLS that is the only one that I found to be truly college-level - and when I say college-level, I mean that the way she presented the material would not have been amiss at the college I later attended, which was Harvard. I don't know why she ever became a high school teacher when there is no doubt in my mind that she could have been a great college professor, but it was to the gain of her AP students for sure. She was so intellectually involved with the material; her excitement and passion were clear when she'd be delving into some of the finer philosophical points of Borges or Unamuno. She was one of the best poetry teachers I've had in any language. And with the honors class, in a direct 180 from the way she'd been with the non-honors class, she was patient. She'd work with the class until we understood the themes of the work, but she'd never give us an interpretation flat-out; she worked with us to try to help us develop our own perspectives. Given that we were studying authors who are challenging when read in one's native language, teaching them so well was no small feat. I still remember the class she taught on Garcia Marquez's short story "Monologo de Isabel viendo llover en Macondo" (translated in the collection Leaf Storm as "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo"). In English, it's not one of his better-known short stories - I don't know about in Spanish. But I just remember studying it under her guidance and being drawn into the eerie, compelling atmosphere of the story. I remember her talking at the end of the class about how the story haunted her. I remember being haunted by it too. And, in general, there is no other class from which I have retained so much of the material as I did from that class. There is no other teacher from whom I learned so much. At BLS I studied four languages (including English) under dozens of teachers, and she set the standard that no one else could quite meet.
I warmed to her over the years, as she did towards me. She warmed towards several of the students in the class, really; I wasn't the only one who liked her in that class. Yet she was never going to be a kindly teacher you'd run to in times of trouble: I remember one day I was at the school after hours, and she was working in her classroom, and I had nowhere in particular to go so I asked if I could sit in her classroom until my appointment a little later. I was shocked and hurt by the vehemence with which she said no, absolutely not, there are plenty of unlocked classrooms in this building and you don't need to sit here. Of course I didn't; I just liked her and didn't see the harm. But that wasn't the way she was. Her passion was for the teaching, not for the students. You had to take that for what it was.
I think part of the reason I was drawn to her was her brilliance. Why was she teaching high school? As her obituary notes, she was fluent in four languages. Her intellectual acuity was razor-sharp; she was as brainy as anyone I've met, and I have spent a large portion of my life being overawed by other people's brilliance. And I've always found her fascinating as a woman who made some pretty trailblazing achievements. She was the first female teacher to teach at BLS - it was an all-male school for both students and teachers for a very long time. I can imagine what it must have been like to be the first female to join the old boys' club that Latin School had been, especially given BLS's complacently prideful attitude towards its history and traditions (it's the oldest public school in the country, and it spends a great deal of time telling you how many signers of the Declaration of Independence went there. Got a BFF relationship with Harvard, claims Harvard was founded initially to give BLS students somewhere to go. You get the idea.) I imagine she pissed a lot of people off, because she just did not stand down or give in to anybody when she knew she was right, and she was smart enough that that was most of the time. The obituary gives the teachers' and the administration's perspective n that.
This is getting really long, and I know it's not that interesting. But here's a final thing I want to say, which will sound really bitchy initially, but it ties in to a lot of what I want to say here. Six months ago or so another longtime BLS teacher died, Inez Middleton. Ms. Middleton was a teacher who was beloved by the students. She was the polar opposite of Ms. Ponte (I always found it amusing that their classrooms were directly across the hall from one another): she took the students in as family, listened to their troubles, counseled them. She spent a lot of class time talking about sex and drugs in ways that teens could relate to. And when she died there was a tremendous outpouring of grief from the students: scholarships started in her name, Facebook memorial groups up the wazoo. The only problem with Ms. Middleton is that she didn't teach. I had a lot of issues with Ms. Middleton, which I'm not going to get into because my point here is not to rag on a dead woman who was well-loved by so many people, but here is the one that's relevant here: she did not teach. She didn't read most of the books she assigned (representative question aimed at the class, taken from the unit on Tess of the D'Urbervilles: "So... what do you think, did Tess get raped?" Asked because she sincerely didn't know.) She didn't know her subject and her classes were generally not English classes so much as a free-for-all for students to talk about whatever they wanted to. And that's valuable, I know - many students will testify that she helped them not to slip through the cracks, which is huge and deserving of every word of love and gratitude ever spoken to and of her. But I feel like it's teachers like Ms. Middleton who get all the credit for being good teachers (she'd won tons and tons of teaching awards), because students love those teachers. And Ms. Ponte was not widely loved by her students, and her death is not going to receive the outpouring of grief and heartfelt sentiment that Ms. Middleton's did. And that is what it is. But I wanted to write about Ms. Ponte; I wanted to say the things that are on my mind about this woman who taught me so much and inspired me to delve more deeply into literature and to love the authors she loved. I don't want to idealize her, but I wanted to talk about her. I wanted someone, maybe, to know her as I knew her. Not very well; I never knew her as a woman, only as a teacher. But she was an extraordinary teacher. Although I know this entry will be skimmed by most and dismissed as boring by many others, I really just wanted to say it. She's a teacher who left a deep impression on me and whom I will always remember.
I am feeling very sad right now. I have thought of her so often in the years since I graduated high school - I've never lost the passion for Spanish literature that she instilled in me - that I had more than once considered writing her a letter to tell her what her classes had meant to me, because I suspect she didn't get a lot of letters like that. I never got around to it, and now she's dead. People, if any of you are stalling on doing something like that, please do it now. It really, really sucks to know that I could have written her a letter that would have given her a moment of happiness in the months when she was so ill and that I didn't get around to it. I have had little exposure to death in my life, no one really close to me has died, and this is hitting me hard - the first time I've really experienced the reality that sometimes people die before you get to tell them what they meant to you.
"Rest in peace" seems a terribly facile thing to say. It says in her obituary that she was a devout Catholic. I hope that in death she has found that whatever ultimate meaning she sought in her religion is real and true. I hope... I don't know what I hope. Only, selfishly, that she knew on some level what she'd meant to me and to other students who cared about her. I hope someone else wrote her the letter that I didn't write.
