This Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon the Hillcrest community will celebrate the retirement of teacher Liz Trice at the high school. Trice is retiring after teaching in our neighborhood for 43 years. Though she spent most of those years at St. Mark’s, she survived at Hillcrest during its most challenging days, right after the court-ordered busing of 1971, when police sometimes patrolled the halls and a good chunk of the faculty and student body left.
More on Trice here after the jump.
Despite the tensions at Hillcrest, Trice soon became part of an elite group of teachers there.
“ [Trice] was part of a quartet of incredible teachers, now either gone or retired, including the legendary newspaper adviser Julia Jeffress, trig teacher and golf coach Maxine Cammack and art teacher and yearbook adviser Margaret Hudson,” recalls Steve Kenny, who graduated from Hillcrest in 1974. “They were the closest of friends, and the intellectual heart of the school.”
Kenny, who had Trice as an English teacher his senior year, remembers a particular literary paper she graded.
“I turned in a mess, and was dreading the grade,” he says. “I got a C on content, which was bad enough, but then it said grammar: F, circled emphatically many times. I had never seen an F on anything I had done, and I was pretty shocked. After all, I was co-managing editor of the Hillcrest Hurricane, but I didn’t know how to use commas or semicolons, didn’t know what a gerund was and misplaced my modifiers every other sentence.”
As it turned out, most of the class bombed that paper. And so, Trice spent the next six weeks teaching the kids — all of them AP students — a remedial course in grammar. Now at The New York Times, Kenny says he has Trice to thank for helping him become the professional he is today.
“I have not spoken to her since Mrs. Jeffress’ funeral 24 years ago, but her influence is with me every time I fix a who/whom or lie/lay error in The New York Times.”
Trice, in fact, helped to save traditional English instruction at Hillcrest. At the time, the head of the English department wanted to replace traditional class with seminars that were supposed to catch the interest of teenagers.
“’Reading, Writing and Rapping’ is one that sticks in my mind almost 40 years later,” Kenny says. “Given that Hillcrest’s AP students didn’t know basic grammar, this didn’t seem like a good idea.”
So Kenny and his fellow Hillcrest Hurricane editors enlisted the help of Trice to create a grammar and basic literature knowledge test. About 400 juniors and seniors took that test, and “basically no one passed.”
“This led us on the Hurricane to lead an editorial campaign to stop the changes in the English department. Our effort was not popular among the English faculty. I remember Mrs. Jeffress barring the door to stop the English department head from storming our coat closet of a newsroom. It took a lot of courage for [Trice] to make her stand, and in the end we all prevailed. There would be no ‘Reading, Writing and Rapping’ at Hillcrest. Not in 1974, anyway.”
And that’s just one of the many stories that is Trice’s legacy.
“There are a lot of good teachers, but there are very few who have had the impact of Liz Trice. She simply is one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met.”
