July 7, 2015
Frances Litton Higgins passed on to eternal life on July 1, just over a year after having retired from 25 years of service as a teacher of English and Latin at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School.
On Sunday evening, Good Counsel was the site for the wake service. We estimate as many as 400 came to pay their respects in the Litton Gym, named for her family.
Two things I learned from conversations at the wake service prompted this posting.
Frances was really, truly loved by her students. And they showed up to honor her. One, twenty years beyond graduation and having only set foot on the Olney campus just once, came to visit. Another, having just completed his freshman year at American University, was one of the select few to take Latin in each of Frances’ last three years in the classroom. And, another, a current student who had just two years with Frances, came to pay her respects. Each came not solely because he or she had learned a little Latin. The key, and it’s one that resonates with our Xaverian heritage, is in the love and compassion (and fun) that characterized the educational experience of their Latin classroom. Frances made it personal every day. At the funeral, one student told me, “She respected us so much … she held us to a high standard, but we would talk about a lot of things other than Latin.” When a student would answer a tough question correctly, Frances would insist that everyone turn and look at the person. Learning was always worth celebrating. She shared that Frances was in near perpetual motion in her classroom. But, when she did slow down, she never sat; she would kneel. Every day, Frances did something special and made her students feel special.
The other thing was a real “aha!” moment for me. A parent of one of Frances’ former students told me how good Frances made her feel about the job she was doing as a parent. At parent conferences, no matter how dire the classroom performance or how miserable the grade, Frances could find wonderful things to say about each student and turn that into a powerful endorsement of a tremendous job being done by the parents. The parent shared how a meeting with Frances lifted her up. This seems like an undervalued dimension of the power and influence we all have as teachers. As her husband, John, told me, Frances was ever a “picker-upper.”
I never had Frances for a teacher. I was present in her classroom but a few times for a few minutes. What I have heard these past few days from students and parents confirms what we all know about the great teachers. Long after we have forgotten the content—the Latin declension, how to balance the chemical equation, the mathematical theorem—we remember how it felt to learn from someone who cared about us.
May God grant Good Counsel more teachers like Frances Higgins.