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Celebrating Mrs. McKee:
Reflections on Five Decades It’s 1982, and the winter has been the kind of rainy that will be a rarity three decades later. The redwoods brighten. In Palo Alto, on Castilleja’s distinguished campus, young women in the pursuit of a world-class education hurry across the Circle to lunch, packs or books over their heads, none of them prepared with an umbrella, uniforms darkening in the wet.
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feature Inside Rhodes Hall, Peggy McKee waits for a dozen or two-dozen girls—whoever feels like watching today’s installment of “Lunchtime Cinema”—to file into her classroom. She’s wearing Jacques Cohen espadrilles; her Levi’s denim backpack is half-open on a nearby table. Into the VCR—the school’s first VCR, the VCR Peggy herself was responsible for acquiring—she slides Brideshead Revisited or Flame Trees of Thika. The room is full. They’re seeking shelter from the rain, a dry place to eat their bag lunches, some passive absorption of culture in an intellectually-demanding day—but they come for something, else, too. “We were self-proclaimed history nerds,” Heather Pang ’84HA reflects. “But it was the cool place to be. And I think she made it the cool place to be.” Since her arrival in 1960, Peggy McKee has shown three generations of Castilleja women that it is cool to be smart and passionate. She is nothing short of a legend. They all know her story: She came in 1960, then left for two years to go to graduate school while her now-husband (of 50 years, Ted McKee) served in Germany. She came back to Castilleja in 1965, then left again for a few more years to raise her children. In 1973 she returned for her third go, and has been here ever since. Her “McKee-isms” (“CHIA”; “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”) are as much a part of the Casti lexicon as “’Yo” and “the 5Cs”. Yearbooks have been dedicated to her. She has designed and written and revised the history curriculum many times over. She once took a class of students to the USSR; in 1986 she spent a semester teaching ESL in Nanjing. In 2001, she won the American History Association’s Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award. She will retire at the end of this year—her 45th at Castilleja—as one of the school’s most beloved. Says Anjelika Deogirikar ’00, who two decades later still has her outlines from Mrs. McKee’s Cultures and Civilizations class: “Mrs. McKee is Castilleja.” An outsider might expect Mrs. McKee—a fifty-year teacher who spent many of those years in coke bottle glasses and cotton turtlenecks under jumpers, at least according to Castilleja’s photo archives; a
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Mrs. McKee on the Circle with students in 1995
septuagenarian whose famed catchphrases include the endearingly perplexing “Gabunzles!”; a petite woman who, in 1990, had “crush” on Mikhail Gorbachev and even wore a sweatshirt hand-painted with the phrase “I love Gorby”—to exhibit a certain kind of diffidence. But that person would be wrong. Mrs. McKee is tenacious. Her students describe how she literally jumps during class; her colleagues will say that you cannot possibly be passive during her lectures. (“There’s lecturing and then there’s lecturing,” she says.) She is after all these years energetic, enthusiastic, invested—but what is forgotten in these characterizations of her captivating teaching is the grit that got her here. She became a teacher because “that’s what you did,” she says, pointing to her female relatives who did the same. But the truth is that in 1960—a decade before the Women’s Movement really took hold—for a woman to work outside the home at all (except as a secretary or nurse, or only temporarily until she married) was still uncommon. Mrs. McKee is an historian by training, with degrees in her field from Smith and Northwestern (she was turned away by the latter school’s PhD program, a fact she still
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Mrs. McKee teaching the Class of 2009
laments). She is a natural in the classroom, with an intuitive sense of how to always put her students first—but she is also dogged, indefatigable. For years she typed and re-typed her own textbooks. She imagined and implemented the history department’s elective system, which was nonexistent when she first started. For over twenty years she moved through the ranks at the College Board, grading and eventually helping to write the AP European History exam. In an era when education is trending STEM, it is surprising to realize that a history teacher has been at the forefront of incorporating technology into the classroom—provided, she is careful to articulate, the technology actually enhances the learning experience. She procured that VCR all those years ago because it would allow her to show clips rather than entire films, as one had to with projectors and their clunky reels; in the early nineties her students did presentations using Adobe PageMill; she was one of the first teachers to put course information on a website. “For a teacher in such a traditional subject,” Deogirikar says, “she has always been very forward-thinking.”
She made it her mission to serve as a mentor to new teachers, noting the lack of mentoring in her own career: “It wasn’t really a thing then. It just wasn’t what you did.” When pushed on the subject, she cites the women in her family—her mother and her aunts Ellen and Marion—as “de facto” mentors. Marion Cathcart Carswell was a public school teacher, principal, and eventually assistant superintendent in Winnetka, Illinois whose progressive style and thinking eventually led to her appointment as a consultant for the United States government when it established schools for GI-dependent children in Europe after the war. “I mean she was really somebody,” Mrs. McKee elaborates, “and she was really somebody not as somebody else’s wife. And that had a big impression on me.” It is tempting to think that Mrs. McKee doesn’t quite know how many women she has mentored just as meaningfully in her half-century in the classroom—but that would require ignoring her motto: “It is always about the girls,” she says, her eyes flashing. She is deliberate and intentional, even on this warm October afternoon in her final year at Castilleja, spending her advisory period gamely teaching her advisees a line dance they (herself included) will later perform during a “You Asked for It!” They adore her. She will tell them—all of her advisees, year after year of high-achieving scholars—that they cannot do everything. She is wisely cautioning against the ways young women overextend themselves. But teaching demands of its professionals exactly that: an ability to be all things to all people; to write textbooks and do line dances; to have a rich content knowledge but also an understanding of social-emotional learning; to be serious and focused but also playful; to be brilliant but approachable. Peggy McKee—all at once a teacher and a mentor and in loco parentis and a friend to ninthgraders and faculty members alike—perhaps does not exactly follow her own advice. 1989: Posing with renowned ‘hippie’ activist Wavy Gravy 1996: Preparing a meal with African Studies students for the Africa Day celebration with Beechwood School 2001: Pinning the carnation of Sarah (Vander Ploeg) Beck ’02
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