Teaching

I come by my love of teaching honestly. It’s the family business. Both my parents were public school teachers, as have been my stepchildren and my cousins (by the dozens), not to mention many of my closest friends. And the affliction seems to be hereditary. One maternal second great grandfather of mine, John T. Seward (1794-1871), was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Pontoosuc, Illinois, before the Civil War. A paternal sixth great grandfather, Benjamin Sneed (1721-1819), was schoolmaster to Thomas Jefferson’s family near Monticello; a ninth, Thomas Thacher (1620-1678), was professor and mentor to the American theologian and eventual Harvard president Cotton Mather. An eleventh great grandfather, John Lothrop (1584-1653), was a London contemporary of William Shakespeare; he pastored an independent congregation just blocks from the Globe Theatre in Southwark. Imprisoned there for his religious teaching independent of the Church of England, he was afterward exiled to America, where he became one of the architects of the doctrine of separation of church and state.

“We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…”