According to Margaret Wellford Tabor ’55

List of 12 items.

• What is one of your favorite things about Hutchison?

  My favorite thing about Hutchison when I was a student was the spirit and atmosphere of a love of learning and a love of the students that Mary Grimes Hutchison filled her school with. The spirit was strict, but it was basically a loving atmosphere. I learned from Helen Lowrance, who was teaching at that time, that Miss Hutchison picked her teachers out from all over the country, and not just those who had academic degrees. They were those who loved learning and loved teaching. During the Depression, when parents couldn’t pay tuition, she couldn’t pay her teachers. But the teachers refused to let her close the school, saying they would teach without pay. That was how much they loved this school. When Helen Lowrance called me to come to Hutchison to replace a teacher who had been fired in the middle of the year (something she had never had to do before), it was my second time teaching there, and I told her that I wasn’t prepared to teach social studies. She said that if I would just come and love those little girls, she didn’t care if I taught them anything else at all. It was that spirit of Miss Hutchison that I have always loved.

• What is something students will remember about you and your class?

  I think what they liked the most about my teaching is that I really liked being there with them and I liked teaching. I expected them to be disciplined, and I expected them to study. I gave them a PLQ (Picky Little Quiz) every single day. I was tough, but I knew that they could do it. I had lots of padding in my tests, so nobody ever failed one. I had ways for everybody to do relatively well, but it was also challenging for the very top students. I never gave the same test twice. EVER. 

• What is something you will remember most about your students?

  That I looked forward to going to Hutchison to teach them every day. They were all different. They were from everywhere and every place, and for the most part, they were good classmates. They were good team players. It was a very pleasant atmosphere to teach in.

• What do you remember learning from your students or that you were surprised by?

  I remember the day officials were coming to review the school for accreditation purposes, and they were sending people into the classroom to observe. It was maybe two months into that spring, and they sent a man who sat quietly in the back of my Social Studies class. I asked a question, and the hands went up. I asked another question, and the hands went up again. Then one student said to another, “Oh, that was an interesting point you made.” They were fifth graders! Pretty soon, we had a grad school level discussion going on. The man in the back of the room was looking pretty amazed. When he walked out, I said to the girls, “Where did that come from?” They replied, “We were not going to embarrass you in front of that man.” I said, “Uh huh. You just cooked your own goose!’’ They had convinced their previous teacher (who had been unkind and was consequently dismissed) that they couldn’t read. What I discovered was that Hutchison students were very intelligent, and they were capable of doing the very same intelligent work as graduate students anywhere.

• What was your favorite book to teach?

  I don’t know that I had a favorite book. But Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry and Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, were both excellent guides for teaching. We could read the great writers’ short fiction and poetry and learn about the voice and style of each writer. When Bob Lynn hired me to teach, he told me I could design my own course. I was floored. But he said he needed me to teach writing and composition. So, we used those books as a guide. For example, for one quiz I took the fairy tale of Cinderella and wrote different paragraphs in the voice of different authors, like Joyce, Hawthorne, or Faulkner, and the students had to match the writers and the corresponding style paragraph. 

• What is your favorite novel?

  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Because, well, I don’t know. I just have read it over and over. It is so classical that every time I read it, Austen seems to address the current problems in the world. It is just so well written.

• What is your favorite Shakespeare play?

  If I had to pick one play that I have read and taught more, it would be Hamlet. It contains a wealth of insight and wisdom, of trying to understand man’s search for meaning in life.

• Do you have a favorite Shakespeare quotation?

  In As You Like It, Celia fusses at Rosalind for talking all the time. Rosalind’s response is: “When I think, I must speak.”

• What is something your students might not know about you?

  When I was in college, an all-women’s college, everybody had to sign up to do something in the senior musical melodrama. I signed up to be a torch singer, but instead I got the male lead. My name was Gilbert Stargazer. My opening line of the aria was: “Someday I know I’ll see the stars above!” I was dressed up in men’s lederhosen with a Tyrolean hat, and I was playing an astrophysicist’s apprentice. I was supposed to be in love with his daughter, and she was two inches taller than I was. I had lost my voice, and I had no understudy. So, I had to go on. I had the opening aria, and when I walked out on stage, I looked funny evidently, and the audience started laughing. Well, my voice came back, and there I was: Gilbert Stargazer. That was my great moment on the stage, and it taught me that I never ever ever wanted to be an actress, at least not in a theatre.

• If teaching hadn’t been your dream, what career would you have pursued?

  There was a period of time when I thought I was going to be a writer. I kept journals and wrote stories and poetry. My professor at Connecticut College told me, “Now Margie, you are not going to write the great American novel.” I’m sure I looked confused, but then he said. “Let me put it this way: I hope you don’t have the experiences in life that would enable you to do write such a novel.’’ That puzzled me for a long time, but I think he was right. That was William Meredith, who later became the U.S. Poet Laureate in the 1970s. I’m grateful. It made me think about the hard experiences that many great writers have that move them to write. Or, maybe in another life, I would have loved to have been a singer in a nightclub. Someone would have been playing the piano, and I would have been Ella Fitzgerald, singing with all of my heart.

• What is one of your favorite trips you’ve taken and why?

  Oh, there was a time when my husband Owen said that we had to have a theme when we were traveling, so we went to discover where Camelot might have been. That was probably my favorite trip.

• Why do you love Hutchison?

  To return to the books I love: I love to read, and this love is encouraged, nurtured and valued at Hutchison. When I was growing up, my favorite gifts at Christmas were books. Three books that I have read more than once are Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, and Katherine by Anya Seton. At Hutchison, even though we were all girls, it felt very normal. It wasn’t like being in a nunnery. Outside of school, we all lived with fathers and brothers and had cousins and friends who were boys, and Hutchison had lots of sports. I looked forward to gym class. We had the Black Team and Gold Team, and we were constantly playing on teams and learning about how to get along and include others. Was it perfect? No. Was it always fun? No. But it was a life experience for which I’ll always be grateful, and the teachers I’m telling you about never would have humiliated a student. If you were laughing in Miss McIntosh’s class, you were politely asked to go into the hall until you could contain yourself.