The Quality of Service

Mrs. Pope was my fifth grade teacher. I did not know the word back then, but she was a renaissance teacher. As her students, we painted, sculpted, created scrapbooks, played classroom games, learned poetry, and staged musicals complete with costumes. It was the whole-person approach completely uncharacteristic of the structured rote-learning typical teacher of that era. To Mrs. Pope knowing about Beowulf and Mozart were as important as knowing the names of all the capitols or the formula calc...