Carrie Walker ’98, Cave Spring, Ga., remembers many things about her former Darlington English instructor, Skip Saunders but the one piece of advice she remembers the most became the thesis for her nomination of him for The University of the South Secondary Teaching Award. “Carrie, you can’t go through life labeling things black and white,” Saunders said to her at least once and taught her in literature many times over. “You have to see the gray.”
The strength of her nomination won the teaching award for Saunders. “He was the most open-minded and intelligent teacher I ever had,” she recalled in her nomination. “As a junior I entered his [English III Honors] class with a closed mind and firm opinion of everything. It did not take very long for him to change my life completely.”
“We [students] were all encouraged to find new and alternative ways to perceive the literature we were reading,” Walker said in her nomination. “Above all things, Mr. Saunders emphasized the importance of thinking for oneself.
“As a woman, I cannot begin to put into words the many ways in which he helped me understand my place in the world, foster my abilities as a human being, and find my voice as a member of a gender that has been traditionally silenced in an androcentric world of literature. His place in my small, southern, elite, private high school has proven the necessity in all forms of education for women and men of his standards, ideals, and character,” she said.
“He helped me see that I could achieve anything in life so long as I followed my heart. Since his class, I have never once ignored the gray,” she concluded.
Walker graduates from Sewanee this spring with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and women’s studies. She will continue her education with a master’s program in rehabilitation counseling at the Medical College of Virginia.
