forever grateful: remembering tracy waters

MADAME WATERS GOT THE BEST FROM EVERY STUDENT SHE TAUGHT

—Everett McKinney, Associate Head of School Emeritus

It is rare indeed to have a friend or colleague of many years with whom one never had a cross word or negative interaction. For me, however, Tracy Waters was such a friend and colleague.

Tracy and I were teaching partners for close to thirty years at TPS. She was truly a master teacher or a “teacher’s teacher,” some might say. She had the unique talent for knowing the exact number of demands to make in order to get the best from a student. She rarely failed to accomplish her instructional goals in a reasonable, sensitive, yet effective way.

Tracy’s native-like fluency in French was quite impressive, but what I and many of her former students will remember most is her kindness as a teacher. Tracy never failed to give a student the benefit of the doubt and to see her students as people first. In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker J. Palmer asserts that in the end it is rarely the content of our discipline that our students learn from us. For Palmer, what students in our classes are really learning is HOW we teach them our subject, especially the ways we interact with them when the content we teach is challenging.

Working from this premise of providing thoughtful, caring instruction, Tracy excelled. The passion and joy she had for sharing her knowledge of the French language, its literature and its culture, were contagious. Her goal always seemed to be to make the experience of being in her class one of the most positive a student could have. That way, if a student later decided to continue or return to French studies, one had the positive experience with her as a benchmark.

The meticulous preparation Tracy took to prepare five different lesson plans weekly is well known by the World Language Department members, and it is a testament to her lifelong dedication as a teacher. In her role as the Chair of World Languages, she conducted timely, effective, goal-oriented meetings; she was also a fair and supportive evaluator of those in her department.

For 20 years, Tracy coordinated Racine’s Sister City exchange program with Chabrillan, an independent school similar to TPS, in Montélimar, France. Every other year she traveled with juniors and seniors to France during Spring Break. Fortunately for me, when the group size required two chaperones, I would have the opportunity to travel with them. One time I asked Tracy if she didn’t get tired of doing this trip biennially. She shared that it delighted her to no end to see the reaction of her students when they visited the places, ate the food, and experienced first-hand the culture they had read about and studied in the abstract.

Some of our friendship’s most memorable moments occurred on these travels. She and I developed a ritual of finding, within forty-eight hours of our arrival in France, a café or brasserie where we would order a croque-monsieur (a simple grilled ham and cheese sandwich). The cherished, accommodating friend that she was, she always indulged me in this little ritual, and for that and so much more I will be forever grateful.