Patricia Kistler was tall and stylish with elegant silver hair and a kindly smile. Underclassmate Dr. Jim Jenks, who studied 11th and 12th grade English in Mrs. Kistler’s class, writes: “What I remember most was her passion for Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy. When she assigned the term paper on Macbeth I had no idea where to begin. She suggested that I write about the contrasting dark and light imagery in the play and I ran with that. This was back in the day when we did our research in actual libraries and took notes on 3 x 5 index cards. No easy task. The paper served me well and lived again, with minor alterations, in Comp 101 at Oneonta State. I also loved the way she dissected Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge. We had nightly reading assignments of 20 to 30 pages that were hard to get done on top of Beryl Record’s gargantuan math homework assignments. But I looked forward to the literature reading as a way to unwind, as I do to this day. And it seems that a week doesn’t go by that I don’t score a few points on Jeopardy thanks to the lessons learned in Mrs. K’s class.” Another underclassmate, Susan Jenks Matthews, remembers Pat Kistler’s human side. “She was quite the unique woman. There was a boy in our class who always fell asleep during class. She would not let anyone tease him or wake him up because he worked hard on his family’s farm and he needed his sleep. I think she was wonderful. She also had each senior class read Macbeth and write a term paper. She warned us against writing about the witches because one of her prior students had written such a glowing and perfect paper on that subject. That student? None other than my brother Jim!”
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 13:09:57 +0000
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