Ms. Wanza

My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Wanza Sharp, died Jan. 27, 2008, at the age of 92. That she of all people should live to be 92 probably surprised very few who knew her. Ms. Wanza was perpetual energy and motion. She was active, enthusiastic and very involved with her students. She was born to be a teacher.

She was born into a family of educators, actually. At a place and time when even going to high school was luxury, Ms. Wanza's family produced teachers and school administrators who were well known and respected in Union County, Tennessee. One sister was a much-loved high school biology teacher. A brother became superintendent of schools. Her youngest brother went to Harvard and became a professor of at the University of Tennessee.

Ms. Wanza began teaching at Horace Maynard High School, but eventually settled into a fourth grade classroom at Maynardville Elementary. That's where I met her.

I'd had wonderful teachers before, but none quite like her. We were going to have fun, she said. If we finished our work, we'd do dictionary drills. We would compete to see who could find definitions the fastest, and that would be fun. We were going to have fun with math, of all things. We would learn long division and, when we did, we'd have so much fun we might just spend all day doing long division. She made us believe this might actually be true.

And it was. We worked long division problems in chalk on a green board for hours at a time. We did spend a couple days doing just math, which none of my other teachers had ever seemed all that enthusiastic about.

Ms. Wanza was enthusiasm itself. We would learn what we needed, even if it wasn't in the book. She got us workbooks on maps and graphs, something no other fourth graders in the area had. That material would be on our achievement tests, she said. It was. But the knowledge would be basic to the rest of our lives.

Ms. Wanza's natural ability to teach touched all of us, but especially a few kids in the classroom. These were the kids, especially a few boys, who seemed to fade into the classroom woodwork all the other years. They were quiet; they were badly behind; they wanted to be somewhere else -- probably just about anywhere other than school. Come high school, most of them disappeared.

But not in Ms. Wanza's class. With her, they had identities. She knew their grandpas, she said, and their cousins and their moms and dads. She tousled their hair when she walked by and gave them affectionate nicknames. In return she got grins, and wonder-of-wonders, some actual progress. For that one year, if no other, these kids actually seemed to like school, at least a little, and to feel at home there enough to learn.

Later, after she retired, Ms. Wanza came back to school as a substitute teacher. She seemed to know a little bit about every subject as she roamed from class to class at the high school. She seemed to be there at least half the time. And she was just as fun as ever. Ms. Wanza in class meant a good school day.

Now she's no longer with us. If they happen to need someone to teach long division in heaven, she'd be perfect for the job.

I've always thought that heaven would be a place to get answers to all the things you ever wanted to know -- and to find out what really matters. If that's the case, I hope Ms. Wanza gets to see how much her life's work mattered. I hope she gets to see all the lives she touched, and that her legacy lives on.