held tightly against her chest, their weight balanced by the purse hanging from her right arm. “Catch of the day” I used to call that pile, while still Dr. Lee’s student, silently smiling to myself when “spying” on her from the cozy couches of the Cobb Hall lobby.  Many students agree that Dr Lee is a challenging teacher, diplomatically put. Off the record, her exams were, for some, scary, caused blood-pressure to rise and induced, well, even terror. But somehow students would always admit to this facet of their Spanish class with Dr. Lee with a smile and that  aura that we humans sometimes get when we know we have broken boundaries.  She pushed us to do so daily.

 Dr Lee always seems to be up to something, and I doubt that retirement will change this.  She presides over conferences, organizes Luso-Hispanic Day, initiates students into the Foreign Language Society, coordinates the Spanish Composition Contest. The list can go on endlessly, but I will leave it up to you to continue. Dr. Lee seems to always be on the move with one goal: getting the students involved. And though I wanted to avoid clichés here, there’s just no other way to express it:  I hope I can be like her, someday.

          

It has taken me many days to start writing this small article; I could not stop thinking of the responsibility involved in talking about a person who has helped me find my career. Dr. Lee has been a mentor for many generations of students through her work and qualities (honor, great pedagogical abilities, infinite passion) and I have decided, after reading the following quote, that I do not want to use any big words here: “Siempre quise escribir algo sobre Neruda, no el enorme Neruda de la fama, sino el íntimo, lleno de ternura y cálida ironía que se prodiga junto al mar” (“I have always wanted to write something about Neruda, not the enormous

Neruda of fame, but the intimate one, full of tenderness and warm irony who lavishes next to the sea” – Antonio Skármeta). Of course, I am not Skármeta, nor is Dr. Lee the Nobel Prize winning poet. Nevertheless, she is the object of my admiration and of the admiration of many others whose lives she has touched in her career. We cannot award her the Nobel Prize – I doubt that one even exists for education and, if it did, the teaching of some subject other than foreign languages and literature would probably have priority.  We can also not offer her the one million dollar check that comes with the Nobel prize but we can show our respect to Dr. Lee by using her own media: the written word.

When I think of Dr. Lee I see an image that is never static; a minute lady who walks hurriedly — short steps, arms always full of a not so orderly pile of books, students’ exams and essays

 

It is difficult to believe that there are only a few weeks left in my first academic year here at the University of West Georgia. Thanks to my great colleagues I have settled into the life of the department, met many interesting people, and gotten to know Carrollton and Georgia much better. In January, I took a road trip with Muriel Cormican and John Blair to Tybee Island to participate in the “Sprachbad

Savannah,” an immersion weekend and pedagogy workshop for German teachers at all levels.  Teaching has, of course, kept me on my toes: in addition to elementary German, I taught Composition in the fall and am teaching Advanced Language Skills in the spring. It has been very exciting to see the high level of (continued on p.3)

 

A Tribute to Dr. Cecilia Lee by Anca Koczkas

Dr. Gary Schmidt joins us in German

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

Palimpsest

Spring 2007

Volume 1, Issue 1

Special points of interest:

· Dr. Cecilia Lee retires

· Dr. Gary Schmidt Joins the Department

· What Our Alumni Are up to!