Remembering Jean Hart

A native of Charlotte, N.C., with an undergraduate degree from Salem College, Jean Hart knew education well. She had taught for years, first at Mary Munford School, then at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, and for two decades in the Lower School and Girls Middle School at Collegiate before her retirement.

 

Her husband and Steve’s dad, Dr. Philip R. Hart, was a longtime and much revered professor of religion at the University of Richmond, so scholarship, intellectual curiosity, and inquiry were ingrained in the family culture.

 

Steve remembers well her counsel.

 

Don’t become a teacher just because you like the subject matter, she told him. Teaching must be your calling. The subject matter can be your passion, but the real reason you should teach is the interaction with students and the desire to make them better and see things in them that they don’t necessarily see in themselves.

So said the master teacher.

 

“She always said that you really have to want to provide your students with the best opportunity they can have to reach their educational growth potential,” Steve said one day recently when reflecting upon his mother, who passed away June 10 at 94. “What she appreciated about people was their intellect, character, humor, and laughter. She had tolerance, but she also had some strong lines about structure and proper behavior for kids.”

 

Jean’s path to Collegiate was a bit circuitous.

 

As a young teacher in the early 1950s, she rented a room in a house in the Mary Munford neighborhood, and her landlord fixed her up on a blind date with a young Air Force chaplain named Phil Hart who also served as associate pastor at Tabernacle Baptist Church.

 

“When I asked, ‘Why did you fall in love with Dad?’” Steve said with a chuckle, “she answered, ‘His smile, his laughter, and when he came to pick me up, he was wearing his Air Force uniform.  And he had his own car.’”

 

There was more to the story, of course. They married in 1953, moved to Langley where he was stationed, and ultimately returned to Richmond where Dr. Hart joined the UR faculty in 1956 and served with distinction for 35 years before he retired as professor emeritus.

 

She didn’t know Collegiate well in the ’60s, but she knew enough of the School’s reputation and the leadership of Catharine Flippen and Malcolm U. Pitt Jr. that she applied to teach.

 

Ultimately, Elizabeth Burke, the venerable head of the Lower School, hired her to teach 4th Grade, and after several years she joined Mrs. Flippen and later Julia Williams in the Girls School as a 5th Grade humanities teacher.

 

“She liked the idea of a rigorous academic educational environment,” Steve said. “At some point, she came to think this would be a terrific option for her family.”

 

Both Steve ’78 and his brother Philip ’74 came on board as 7th Graders. Both ultimately sent their children to Collegiate. And Steve, heeding his mother’s advice, returned to Collegiate in 1999 and served first as planned giving officer, later as a woodworking teacher, and throughout his career as a track and cross country coach.

 

Over the years, Dr. Hart studied abroad on three sabbaticals and led educational tours to Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, and his family often accompanied him.

 

“Mom would bring back a lot of materials from those trips and put them on her classroom walls,” Steve recalls. “They were tangible items. Not just books. She wanted to enliven her students’ learning experience beyond the pages of a book.”

 

Former colleagues remember Jean’s bearing as an appropriate blend of prim-and-proper and fun-and-relaxed. She knew when to get down to business, and she knew when to smile and offer an encouraging word. Former students remember her as a teacher who challenged them to perform their best but did so with compassion and caring.

 

“Mom was an academically rigorous teacher,” Steve said. “She was well-read and well-studied. She appreciated intellectual curiosity, attention to detail, organization, and seriousness of purpose in her students.

 

“She loved teaching middle schoolers. They were so eager to learn and so enthusiastic about new things. She would often say, ‘Their minds are like sponges. I really love that age.’”

 ~Weldon Bradshaw