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Sixth grade students reunite with teacher, 60 years later
McCOOK, Neb. — A retired teacher in McCook recently caught up with some former sixth-grade students she taught more than 60 years ago.
Jean Wilcox, 96, keeps in touch with many of her former students and three of them, whom she taught in 1958-59, came to visit her in McCook earlier this month.
Lynda Tredway of Washington, D.C., Anne Whitney of Lincoln, Neb. and Barbara Schifeling of Buffalo, N.Y., first met in second grade in Aurora, Neb., and still meet once a year to reminisce and have a mini-vacation. This year, they chose to come to McCook to meet a couple of Tredways’ friends who own an art gallery and to also visit their former sixth-grade teacher they had in Aurora, Jean Wilcox. They managed to catch up with Wilcox for lunch at the McCook Heritage Senior Center.
Sixth grade can be a pivotal year, with kids not considered elementary-aged anymore but not quite teenagers, either, Tredway said, who’s now an educational consultant. But Wilcox must have made quite an impression. “After all these years, she’s still our favorite teacher,” Tredway said. “Jean just understood kids. She met us where we were in sixth grade and was just incredibly supportive and present for us.”
Wilcox remembers teaching that sixth-grade class in Aurora, her first real classroom after student teaching. “I had just gotten my degree and I was full of ideas that year,” she recalled. The following year, she and her husband moved to McCook, where she stayed home for a few years to raise their children. She later taught school in rural Iran, when her husband moved there for his job and after that, taught kindergarten in McCook for 19 years.
But it was her first year of teaching that sixth-grade class that certainly had an impact on three impressionable young girls. “She was curious, and that made us curious, too,” Tredway said, remembering an erupting volcano the class created and books they read. “She gave us interesting things to read, think and talk about and made us feel important.”
Wilcox brushed aside any compliments about her teaching. “That was a long time ago,” she said. Yet Wilcox’s enthusiasm that year may have been the starting point to nudge all three of her former students into professional careers later on, with Tredway as an educational consultant to school principals and graduate students, Whitney as a therapist and Schifeling as an attorney.
Meeting up with her three former students was fun for Wilcox, she said. “I loved it, I was so thrilled, to see people from so long ago.” And she’s up to more visits from other former students, although they’ll have to come to McCook as driving isn’t her thing anymore.
“Anybody who wants to come, I’d be delighted,” she said.