Georgia On My Mind!

This week I lost a colleague, friend and fellow honors teacher, Georgia Stohr to breast cancer.  She had been fighting this disease for two years and finally her body couldn't fight any longer.  No one thinks about what happens to a teacher if she is no longer there.  She died an hour before her freshmen would take her final, she died three days before her grades were due, she died two days before her students could say goodbye!  Tomorrow I and several of her fellow English teachers will go into her room and pack it up....I know what we will find.  Projects done by previous students, gum in her desk drawer for after lunch, notes she had written of things not to forget before leaving for the summer.  For you see, Georgia never thought she would stop teaching. Georgia told me the week before her death that she had plans to revamp her curriculum this summer and couldn't wait till our students got their computers at registration. I told her I was taking an online class.  We couldn't let the janitors just throw it all away.  Georgia put her heart into everything she did and her heart is still in that classroom. We will pack it up respectfully as we loved our fellow teacher and can't believe she won't be there in the fall.  Georgia taught everyday she could this semester and showed us what it meant to never stop teaching.  Though she is no longer here, she is still teaching her students and her friends how to deal with crisis and never lose hope and that is her legacy. We celebrated Georgia's life in a church Sunday with students, faculty administration and her family.  Though our hearts were broken - I will always have Georgia on my mind when we welcome a new teacher in her cleaned room and new students who heard of the teacher that never stopped teaching!