Class Notes 1940s
2000s
1 NANCY LIBERM AN RATLIFF ’48
shares her gratitude for her GPS education, especially for the five years of Latin she was required to take. “Our eighth-grade teacher was Mary Stuart Becking, a young, inspiring teacher who brought Latin off the pages of a book and into real life. It truly helped when I took Italian in college, and I taught Latin in the public high school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and in the Presbyterian and Catholic high schools. In the past few years, I have taught vocabulary classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute program at the University of Southern Mississippi. It is such fun to open a whole new world of words to adults who never took Latin and never before knew how to pick words apart to find the root meanings. (I use both Latin and Greek roots.) As our language introduces new words almost every day, we can trace them back thousands of years and make more sense of what is being said. Challenge: Find the root of the word "vaccination," and it will floor you how/why we use it. Through our deep GPS involvement in Latin, we also had a good foundation in Greek and Roman mythologies, and I have taught classes in that in high school and at OLLI. I (taught a class) this spring, and the title I assigned to it is: ‘Latin Isn't Dead; It's Immortal.’ I am 91 and going strong, always looking to learn something new. Here's to my GPS education and to the girls attending now and in the future!”
1990s 2 TA M ARA HINES STEWARD '98
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G I R L S P R E P A R A T O R Y S C H O O L G P S .E D U
was appointed by Mayor Tim Kelly and confirmed in March as Chattanooga’s first Chief Equity Officer. “I am deeply honored and excited to join the city and Mayor Kelly in service to our community, its residents, and visitors as we work together to realize his vision for One Chattanooga,” she stated in a release. “Through building bridges, removing barriers, and enabling access, I will work to ensure that Chattanooga is a place where all residents and neighborhoods can thrive and have their voices heard.”
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Research by M AITHILEE KUNDA '02, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and Director of Vanderbilt’s Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Visual Analogical Systems, was recently featured in an article in the The New York Times. Professor Kunda and her colleagues created a video game called “Film Detective,” piloted this spring, where the player wakes up in the year 3021 and has to assist a scientist to catch a villain who is stealing items from the Museum of Human History. The game is designed to be played by those with autism, many of whom have “superior visual thinking but have a lot of difficulty with social action,” Kunda said. Through the use of artificial intelligence, Kunda was able to use gaming with movie clips to ask players why characters act how they did and what was their thinking behind it. Kunda also directs Vanderbilt’s Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Visual Analogical Systems and is a researcher at Vanderbilt’s Frist Center for Autism and Innovation. 4 MICHAL HOWICK ’03 recently completed a two-year graduate school program in strategy at Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter and has started a position as the Associate Director, Strategic Enrollment and Communications at Brandcenter. 5 MEREDITH A . NEAL ’05 was nominated by her organizational group in TVA, Power Operations, for Engineer of the Year for TVA. “I took AP Physics B with Mr. Connor. I had never been exceptionally good at science or math up to that point, but the logical way he taught us really changed my life,” she said. “Mr. Conner helped me realize that I could be good at science, and the next year when I was in his AP Calculus class, I realized that I was good at math, too. His classroom was a huge turning point for my entire life.”
