Faculty & Staff File

Upon learning that his former Latin teacher had passed away earlier this year, Ken Goldstein’80 wrote a tribute to her. 

Valerie Haas: Classically Remembered

By Ken Goldstein ’80

Valerie Haas was a Master Teacher.  She was serious about her work, serious about her students, serious about the classics and their relevancy to our lives. She cared immensely about excellence, precision, continuity, and character. She was guarded, yes, but she was equally multidimensional. There was a lot to her, and if you wanted to know what that was, asking would have been a poor strategy. It was her job to teach, it was our job to learn, but it was everyone’s job to listen and care. If you got that, you got extra credit. And your life was richer for the epilogue.

Context is a variable of interpretation that is not terribly well understood or appreciated. To understand context is to put translation on par with circumstance. Surely even the most stubborn and uninterested recruits can be taught to decline a noun, but can they be taught to understand why otherwise rote memorization might one day save their curricula vitae? The simple answer is you can likely learn anything you want to learn, but the truth is, you must commit to deciphering the context of a subject or you are right back to recitation. A good teacher knows this, and lets you decide how to ascribe context to drill. A great teacher knows when you get it, and withholds just enough satisfaction that you are forced to bring reference to bear.

Just how good was Valerie Haas at this near brutal form of inspiration? My sense is that the football and basketball coaches quietly studied her classroom, but would never tell the tale. Let’s see, you have a roomful of 13 year olds who always raise their hands, enunciate clearly when called upon, share perfect tempo in choral reading, and don’t even bother to step into the classroom if late without an automatic side trip for a tardy slip. The rules are clear. And the scores? Fiftysomething years of gold, sliver, and bronze medals in national competitions, not a year missed without a student celebrated on a global scale with the words “Iolani” and “Hawaii” attached to their accolades. And remember, we are talking Latin.

But back to context. If you dared utter the words “dead language” in her second floor classroom, you were not going to have a good semester. Then again, if you asked her why it still made sense to study Latin in the late twentieth century, you would be readily introduced – for that matter metaphysically welcomed – to purposeful dialogue. Fully a third of all lessons and class discussions focused on etymology – what are the root words in English that we can track to their origins. If you wanted to survive the redlined grammatical assassination of an English or History paper, you were coming to a knife fight with a polished saber – provided of course you had mastered Latin sentence structure. If you thought poetry was tough, Cummings and Whitman had nothing on Ovid or Virgil. Connections from then to later became clear in no less than the texts of Caesar (Omnia Gallia in tres partes divsa est…”) while we also learned how Cicero laid much of the pipe necessary for Shakespeare to mold history into drama (Cicero even secured himself a bit part from The Bard). And once you’ve chewed through the back beat underlying dactylic hexameter, forever more the iambic pentameter of Elizabethan rhythm proves less surreal, more accessible, staggeringly fluid.

So she taught us Latin to make it easier for us to learn everything else?  Well, I suppose I would call that a byproduct, but not quite context.  Imagine for a moment the very notion of teaching Latin to 7th and 8th graders (and the lucky brave who went beyond) in the middle of the Pacific, in an emerging modern city welcoming refugees of the Vietnam airlift. Consider the local political climate of a proudly proclaimed melting pot seeking reconciliation of perspective within its own Polynesian heritage, and planted there an “old school” transitioning from didactic monologue and homilies on original sin to encouraged discussion and embrace of God’s absolute love – no personal computers yet, but the times they really were a changing. Consider the notion of order, structure, and the fundamental task of college readiness for students who knew they had been signed up without escape clause for a college preparatory contract not even knowing a wee bit what was in the deal. Consider on the radio The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors – all highly encouraging of mythic enlightenment, but nowhere including reference to the accusative or case. Now get up and teach Latin, and still turn out thinking honor students. The case for context is no longer shared; it is the teacher’s problem.

Or is it?  Did we really think fear alone – fear of challenge, fear of rigor – was trepidation enough to keep us in tow, let alone rope a dope with the arriving digital age? That was not my observation, intimidation was a style of schooling that lost purpose as expected reasoning replaced mandated conformity, as the daunting essay test really did demand a well supported opinion, and voices were meant to be expressive, not muted in programmed restraint. Could a traditionalist make that switch? She didn’t need to, because she was there from day one.  She never changed because her style was crafted in permanence – stepping in the same river was moot, the forms defined all. It was we who changed, she was the catalyst. The context was the contemporary, though as I later learned many times over, the root of contemporary is temporary. Valerie Haas was of The Day, every day – and it worked.

Am I telling you she was a rebel? Well, if insisting that heels still slam to the floor when other teachers are starting to let students wear their hair over their ears, then I suppose yes, she was a rebel in holding onto tradition. Not surprisingly that was hardly her aim.Her aim was purely to help us understand that the roots of all change rest warily in the past, and in order to effectively bring change one must digest and dissect the past. It is noble to bring reform, but sensible reform is virtually impossible without complete retrospection and intelligent cataloging. We embrace the classics for their beauty and resonance, for their structure and significance, but all creative destruction begins with that which we choose to change. To change an idea, a school, a society – to make the present better – is to embrace the legacies of the before not as perfect, but as accurate in the time of their origin, their context.  The great scientist and the great artist have this in common, before they dismiss the failings of misinformation they fully walk in the realm of the masters. You cannot bring change if you have no empathy for that which you are trying to change. So you study. And you study hard.  For long periods of time. And then when you see what is wrong you also see what is right, whether then or now, in order to come to terms with consequence. And it is the role of a Master Teacher to pass along this truism from generation to generation, whether the static around it is comprised of AM radio or digital streaming, it just does not matter.

The great mentors teach us to learn, and context is the documentary where and when of change, not the more glamorous and speculative why or how. The where and when are learned in our lessons, the why and how are exercises in creativity introduced through event and circumstance. Context remains a priori, the root of perspective, preamble to change. Context is truth serum, inescapable in argument, disarmingly complex, a detective story often without hero, yet always the set up, the amplification, the table setting for the menu to be.  Valerie Haas understood that every hour she was in the classroom, every minute of study hall, even in the fragments of hallway chatter, which I promise you she enjoyed more than she let on. She was studying you, because she wanted you to be ready to be better, to be courageous and take on necessary action. She would help you if you wanted help, she would drill you if you were up to the task, but mostly, she wanted all of us to make the world better by understanding language, poetics, chronology, and discipline. She knew we were just kids, and that we would grow to become adults, and perhaps when we stumbled on a word misused we would know how to find its real meaning. And then do something with it, something creative, something that mattered.

Valerie Haas was that good. We owe her our respect for a lifetime of context. Carpe diem, wrote Horace. At thy call we gather. Godspeed, Miss Haas.