We have all had colleagues who have died, suddenly and unexpectedly. It’s a terrible thing, and a tragedy not just for family and immediate friends and coworkers but for an institution and its community. To be sure, “suddenly and unexpectedly” is not meant to imply a qualitative difference from the sadness any other kind of demise, but schools are complex systems filled with unseen and unknown interconnections and interdependencies, and surprises can jar these systems in unpredictable ways.
Today I learned of the death of an old colleague at Beaver Country Day School, a math teacher of uncommon skill and creativity who also brought to school each day a backpack loaded with empathy that he both projected outward to everyone in his orbit but also bore, literally and figuratively, upon his humble and very private back. When Joe Christy dropped by my office to talk about a kid or about some data of which I had been trying to make sense, I knew that I would learn something, that I would take from our conversation a sustaining serving of food for thought.
From Joe we—students, faculty, and I think even the physical school itself—learned some of the nuances with which racism and bias present themselves in schools and in the world. I remember Joe introducing the concept of stereotype threat in a discussion about a student, and soon we were all reading Whistling Vivaldi and digging into more of Claude Steele’s work. Joe was tinkering with new approaches to grading that were more fair to students and didn’t add one more barrier between the truths of mathematics and what the kids in his classes might learn—it was “Grading For Equity” before we had realized that could even be a thing.
For a couple of years after my first retirement from the school I was a part-timer, with one of my roles being the “data person,” combing through old records and trying to develop ways to make useful sense of all the information. Not exactly a mathematical adept, I was probably miscast in that role, but Joe would drop in to help me, and when retirement #2 came around, the right person was at last handed the keys to the files: Joe, who then saw patterns we had been missing for a few decades and that would make a permanent difference in our work with students and with one another.
Joe Christy was a mentor as well as a teacher to his students, and he gracefully assumed the role that too often falls upon educators of color: as a special advisor, advocate, and interlocutor for students who themselves felt excluded from, confused by, and alienated from aspects of the culture and life of a majority-white school. We all recognized Joe’s genius and commitment to this work, and I am happy that in recent years this became formalized in his role as “Middle School Director of Engagement and Inclusion”; it is apt, but I know this doesn’t cover all of what Joe was offering. And I cannot imagine the feelings of his students at the news of his death.
I hadn’t seen Joe in a year, but when last I dropped in on the school, his calm and genial presence made for a palpably positive moment in my short visit. I knew I was blessed to be in his sphere of influence.
Thank you, Joe, for being my teacher. And the teacher of a much broader “us”: our fellow teachers and administrators and students (including some of my own kids) and our friends and all those with whom we ourselves have shared pieces of what we learned from you.
And the learning we gained is not about content. It’s about skills and habits of mind, the things that matter far more than the solution to the equation or the geometric proof—the perspectives and dispositions that change lives. Joe, you knew how to teach those things—oh, so well.
Thank you, Joe Christy, one last time.