Thousands.
After this week, Dr. Joan Buckley can put down the red pen and enjoy the other things she loves to do. She's retiring from Concordia College.
50 years is a long time in this business, and she spent all but one year at Concordia where she taught thousands of students. Many of them were your basic freshman English composition/literature students. One of them was me.
Dr. Buckley (even today I don't think I could call her Joan) was a legend in her own time at Concordia. She was "old school" in the way that many of the greatest professors are old school. She was very demanding, but high expectations can inspire students to great things. I worked harder on my final term paper for her class than I worked on anything else in my freshman year.
I still have that paper, "The Nature and Treatment of Grace in the Literature of Flannery O'Connor."
I became a fan of Flannery O'Connor's short stories because of Dr. Buckley. I also read Nathaniel Hawthorne for the first time in her class and loved it.
When the end of the semester came, I gave her a good evaluation. But alas, how does an end of semester evaluation measure the enjoyment that a person gets from reading great literature with a critical eye years later?
Thank you, Dr. Buckley. May you enjoy a long, happy, and healthy retirement.
Amen to the great teachers in our lives. The three who most affected me in my undergraduate days were three profs I had at Morningside: Dr. Jan Hodge, Dr. Tom Gilbert (with whom I had lunch the last time I went back home), and Dr. Rudy Daniels.