[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 56 (Tuesday, May 3, 2005)]
[House]
[Page H2780]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          NATIONAL TEACHER DAY

  (Mr. BARROW asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. BARROW. Mr. Speaker, today on National Teacher Day, I want to 
encourage all my constituents and my colleagues to take just a minute 
to thank those teachers who helped us get where we are today, sometimes 
despite ourselves.
  For me those teachers included Ms. Moseley, Ms. Goodwyn, Ms. Rapley, 
Ms. Hughes, and a host of others. But the teacher I want to single out 
is Ms. Bertha Musick. She just celebrated her 96th birthday, and she is 
still going strong.
  She was my 11th grade English teacher, and she was tough as nails. 
Every day it was her job to hammer an understanding and an appreciation 
of good English into the heads of an 11th grade class full of thick-
skulled teenagers.
  Ms. Musick meant business. And while she had a reputation for being 
tough, every one of her students came to realize that her toughness was 
driven by her devotion. Many of us understood that at the time. All of 
us came to understand it over time.

                              {time}  1945

  I cannot tell my colleagues how many times I have heard her describe 
how former students, who used to think of her as the enemy, came back 
to her, sometimes many years later, to thank her for being caring 
enough to be tough. Not just caring enough about her work, but caring 
enough about her students; and they were right.
  Someone once defined an education as what you remember after you 
forget 99 percent of what you learned in school. What Ms. Musick taught 
me, and hundreds of other impressionable youngsters, is the value of 
not giving in and not giving up.
  That is what defined a good teacher in Ms. Musick's day, and that is 
what defines good teachers today, who are overworked, underpaid, and 
underappreciated.
  So to Ms. Musick, at 99 years strong, I just want to say ``thank you 
very much.''

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