Prose and Comments: Thank you, Mrs. M.

According to the New York State Union of Teachers, slightly more than one-third of New York State’s public school educators are set to retire soon or already have. Add to that declining student enrollment rates v. astronomical home prices — a topic we’re well familiar with on the East End — and a subsequent drop in young adults entering the teaching field (or just burning out fast), and it appears we have both a practical and, perhaps, existential crisis on our hands. 

There are so many reasons for all of this, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about, nor am I qualified to do so. Still, in difficult times we all wish for a miracle, or a superhero, to save the day. In the face of it all, I can’t help but wish for an army of Patricia Tait McNallys — although one of her was certainly force enough.

On Feb. 12, Ms. McNally passed away in Naples, Florida. Some knew her initially as Mrs. Mothner; some of us called her Mrs. McNally, the name of her second marriage to then-SIHS Social Studies teacher, Robert McNally. It breaks my heart that there’s an entire generation or two of Islanders who called her by neither of these names; who have no idea who she was or her exacting standards for diagramming sentences or her infectious joy in teaching Chaucer. In the way she pushed our little small-town yearbook, Pogatticut, to award-winning standards with the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the National Press Association. In the way she changed lives, like mine.

All of that is, of course, just words — but words to Patricia Tait McNally were everything. And she made them everything to me. I am who I am today in large part because of Patricia McNally. It’s just a pure, indisputable fact.

Oh, if she saw that I started a sentence with a conjunction! I would quote her own words back to her, with a sly grin: “You need to master the rules in order to break them.” She was talking about grammar, but I suspect she was talking about lots of things in life.

Born in Jackson Heights, Queens, on April 15, 1940, Patricia Alyce Tait was raised by a single mom who came north from Webb, Ala, where a young Patricia would spend summers at her grandmother’s home. “She had a complete belief that she was Scout,” said her eldest son, Josh Mothner, in a recent phone conversation from his home in Marathon, Florida, referencing one of his mother’s favorite books, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In addition to falling in love with great southern writers, that time spent below the Mason-Dixon line allowed her to bear witness first-hand to the deeply ingrained injustices of racism and the importance of education to battle it. 

It informed the path she took as an educator and created a tough-love approach to her teaching methods, swatting aside well-worn excuses like unwanted insects invading her classroom. She pushed her students to work hard, and then harder; to be their best.

She graduated from Hunter High School in Manhattan and then Drew University, where she majored in English. An interim job as a secretary at Look magazine led her to meet and marry Ira Mothner, a senior editor there who shared her fire-in-the-belly sense of personal accountability and duty to fight injustice. 

She landed her first teaching job in East Harlem at John S. Roberts Junior High School in the 1960s, where she taught English Literature to the predominantly Black and Latino student body and became their yearbook advisor. 

“She used to have the kids come to our apartment to work on the yearbook,” Josh remembered. “We had this old Irish doorman who’d call up and say, ‘Uh, there’s a bunch of kids here who want to come up to your apartment. Are they supposed to be here?’ And my parents would say, ‘Yes, send ‘em up!’” They’d pore over the words and images, laying out the pages on the kitchen table and working together into the night to create something of which they could all be proud.

Raised as a Methodist, Patricia became familiar with Shelter Island when her mom sent her to Camp Quinipet in the summertime, and it was here the Island made its first indelible imprint upon her. She and Ira eventually bought a little house in Silver Beach and, when Look magazine folded, decided to move Josh and his brother, Jon, to Shelter Island full-time in 1972.

During that first year, she landed a position teaching at Riverhead High School. By the start of 1973, Patricia was ensconced as the English and, briefly, social studies teacher for junior high school students on Shelter Island, eventually splitting the English and American literature education of grades seven through 12 with the wonderful Richard Herbert. In 1974, she took over as yearbook advisor.

Patricia spent the next 20 years teaching here. Over that time, she became the kind of fiercely tough and unwaveringly caring educator who changes lives. She changed mine. 

I was a good student but, in all honesty, kind of a lazy one. Smart enough to have decent grades (most of the time) but distracted by all the things kids get distracted by. I used humor and what I thought to be clever deflection to divert my teachers’ attentions from the fact that I hadn’t completed assignments or bothered to do the work to understand them. Mrs. M. — the name I and others called her — saw right through me.

She saw my burning desire to be a writer. She pushed me hard to become a good and broad reader. In those years I sat in her classes, we drilled grammar and diagrammed sentences like high-functioning med students working on a cadaver. Through her nothing-less-than-gleeful reading of Edgar Allen Poe we learned onomatopoeia through the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells. We read Byron, Shelley and Keats; Shakespeare and Dickens; Bronte and Melville.

All the normal stuff, sure, but … it was the way she taught it. The breathless, winking joy in her delivery, like she was letting you in on the secret; opening a hidden door and waving you in. It was the way she made you love it as much as she did. 

Back then, many of us didn’t have parents who went to college; we were working-class kids on a little sequestered island, separated physically from the mainland and, seemingly, the rest of the world. She brought it to us. Great teachers do that.

You know what they say: the personal is political. Over the years, I’ve heard the same old, sad tropes pulled out, arguing for the closure of the school here: “We don’t need a high school.” “The education is better off the Island.” “Wouldn’t the kids benefit from being with more kids?” And the ugliest one of all: “The students of Shelter Island don’t amount to much; why spend the tax money on them?” 

“My mom believed that the instruction of young people was the most important thing we could do for society. She believed in holding people accountable — almost to a fault. Some didn’t like it,” said Josh. “She believed in doing the right thing. She was fiercely loyal and stood up for [people] when others wouldn’t.” 

Thank you, Mrs. M., for believing we were worth it.