Because I was able to find less biographical information than usual about these important women in my life, today I'm highlighting three teachers:
Linda Carol Chandler was born in 1948 in Michigan, the daughter of Charles Price and Carolyn Joy (Lapointe) Chandler. In 1950, Linda was living with her parents in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, where her father was a dentist and her mother was keeping house. In 1964, Linda was listed in the Kimball High School yearbook in Royal Oak, Michigan. She was married to Joseph Michael Gosling before 1987.
I met Mrs. Gosling in the fall of 1986 when I was an eighth grader at Avondale Middle School. She was my algebra teacher. The prior year our district had instituted an experimental program, enrolling about thirty seventh graders in pre-algebra. Prior to that year, no student in Avondale School District could take any advanced mathematics course until high school. Generally freshmen took either pre-algebra or “business math”. The program was a success, and most of those thirty students moved up to algebra in eighth grade. Mrs. Gosling likely taught that one section of algebra, and probably a lot of other sections of pre-algebra. As I recall she was a very good math teacher, very methodical, which went well with my learning style. To be completely honest, I don’t remember very much about her, but that’s probably because she was a good teacher – no problems to stick in my mind. She set us all up to take geometry as freshmen, and we were the first Avondale class in several decades to be able to take calculus in high school. By the time we got that far, as seniors, there were only about ten of us left, but we had a jump start on college math that most high school graduates did not at the time.
Mrs. Gosling’s husband, Joseph Michael Gosling, passed away in 2005. Her mother, Carolyn Joy (Lapointe) Chandler, died in 2013. Her father, Charles Price Chandler, is, I believe, still living at the age of 108, in Troy, Michigan. Linda Gosling lives in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
Judith E. Glassman was born in 1947. I could not discover much of anything about her childhood or personal life. Her husband is Paul B. Glassman. I believe they are both still living and residing in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
I met Mrs. Glassman in the fall of 1986, when she was my English teacher. She also taught an eighth-grade foreign language “sampler” course that I took in the second quarter of the school year. (We studied beginning Spanish for five weeks and beginning French for five weeks. The course was aimed at helping us select which foreign language to study in high school – not a requirement in those days, but an elective.) She was businesslike but her classes were fun. I recall doing the spelling bee qualifiers in her class; I was out on the first word I was given – “professor”. One of my academic weaknesses is being unable to visualize very much in my head. I have always been able to spell nearly everything perfectly – if I can write it down. My friend Christy, however, was always a terrific speller, and I think it was that year, our eighth-grade year, that she won her way through several spelling bee competitions.
Denise “Dede” Kay Patrick was born in 1960 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the daughter of David Aaron and Eleanor (Carter) Patrick. She grew up with four siblings (Susan, Ryan, Randy and Amy), and married James Hawkins. Dede was a Spanish and English teacher at Saranac High School in Saranac, Michigan, all the years that I worked there as a mathematics and French teacher.
Dede was small and seemed quiet, and her Spanish students loved her and were fiercely loyal. It was difficult to recruit students to take French in a small school in which so many kids were deeply committed to learning Spanish from Dede! I never had the opportunity to sit in any of her classes, but I enjoyed knowing her from our contact in the staff lounge or at staff meetings. Dede was diagnosed with cancer between 1995 and 2000, during my years as a member of staff with her. She worked as long as she could, but when it came to the point where her treatment made her vulnerable to even the possibility of infection, she took medical leave. When our colleague Beth threw me a baby shower in my last year of teaching, Dede came, too. We weren’t allowed to hug her, for fear of spreading germs she might not be able to fight off. She came from a deeply religious family and didn’t have a TV at home – until she was bedridden, at which point her husband bought her a TV so she would have something to occupy her time. I believe she and her husband had two very young children. When I left teaching at the end of the 1999-2000 school year, I donated my remaining sick days to Dede. Many of my colleagues also gave generously of their banked sick time so that Dede could still help to support her family during her illness.
Dede passed away in 2002, at the age of only forty-two years. When her father David Patrick passed away in 2016, Dede’s husband James was listed among his survivors as his son-in-law, and Dede’s children were listed among David’s 19 grandchildren. I still think of Dede as a wonderful example, and I’m sure many of her former students do as well.
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