HALLWAYS
Alumnae Recall Teachers S
o many things have changed since the good old days at St. Helen’s Hall. The campus has moved, the boys have come, and the name of the school has changed. But at least one thing remains the same: the teachers are still experts in their subject areas and passionately committed to the success of their students. If you ask alumnae/i of St. Helen’s Hall,Bishop Dagwell Hall or Oregon Episcopal School what they appreciated most about the school, the vast majority will not hesitate before saying it was the wonderful teachers that they learned from. In the following reminiscences, several alumnae tell what teachers at St. Helen’s Hall meant to them.
Irene Mate Campbell
Latin Miss Campbell was the
kind of teacher whose lessons hold tenaciously on under the skin, perennially expanding as life becomes increasingly complex. When
sifting through the many-tiered, diverse inheritance: “jettison” and “trajectory,” “mute” and “mutability.” And I can remember exactly the way Miss Campbell said “ablative absolute,” in what Dylan Thomas would call a “small, dry, eggshell voice,” her distinctive costume jewelry glinting in the light as she watched for us to embrace or dismiss the enchantment she found in such a phrase. Kafka said, “A book should be an axe for the frozen sea
within us.” Without Miss Campbell’s Latin, I’m not sure I’d have had the tenacity for all that chopping.
—Virginia Euwer Wolff ’55 Helga Daret
Physical Education Every year that I can remember, Mrs. Daret guided our
I arrived as a high school junior in Latin I, the surprises came daily, beginning with agricola, agricolae, feminine 1, farmer: “Hey! My family are farmers. Agriculture! Aha!” The Ahas continued for two years. Puer, boy: “Stop being so puerile!” Duco, ducere, to lead: induction, deduction, introduction, subduction, abduction. The Romans had words for most of the beautiful and horrible things we do, and we could put them together in stilted sentences, and we could choose to take it all seriously or make fun of it. I became binary and did both. What I didn’t know was that
in a couple of decades, in order to write books, I would need to call up my Latin every day,
24 OES MAGAZINE WINTER 2011 24
little legs out to the schoolyard—and at the old campus it really looked like a yard—or into the small and musty gym on rainy days, and regularly led us in exercises and games to keep us active. Some of the old pictures from that era show how simple things were for girls in sports. It wasn’t fancy, but it was fun. As far as I can remember, Mrs. Daret was “it”—there were no other PE teachers or instructors. She guided every little soul in this arena and also presided over an event at the end of the year called
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