The Women Who Built What Still Stands
The quiet legacy of high expectations and the foundations we build through intentional effort.
The older I get, the more I find myself returning to a small classroom in Memphis, Tennessee.
It was a private Christian school called Towering Oaks, later absorbed into Briarcrest Christian School. I remember Towering Oaks more clearly than almost any other season of schooling. Not because it was dramatic. Not because it was perfect.
Because it was formative.
What I remember most are the women.
They expected us to learn.
Not casually. Not optionally. Intentionally.
We memorized poetry. I can still see myself quietly rehearsing “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost because I had not mastered it the way I should have. I was reading it under my breath in class, determined to get it right. It mattered to me then — not because of a grade, but because expectations had been set.
We were given onion-skin paper and asked to draw maps — carefully, precisely. We learned scale in social studies. Miles meant something. Distance meant something. Accuracy meant something.
If homework was not completed, it was still expected. There was no negotiation about whether effort mattered.
It did.
I remember phonics every morning. I remember reading groups — mine called “Star Wars,” though I did not yet understand the reference. I remember the first word I misread: little. I said “little-lee.” Correction came quickly and plainly. No embarrassment. Just clarity.
We lined up at the teacher’s desk to ask questions. It was not disorder; it was engagement. You waited your turn. You asked. You listened. Authority was not oppressive; it was steady.
One teacher required that our names be written a certain way, the paper folded precisely, the date placed exactly where she instructed. If it was not done correctly, she tore it up, and we started again. Today, that image might feel severe. But I do not remember fear.
I remember the standards.
Standards were a form of belief.
They communicated: You are capable of doing this well.
Recently, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my son, explaining why a zero on an assignment changes everything. He had learned that in many grading systems today, a student who simply turns something in — even incomplete — may receive 50 percent. A zero is often off the table.
He could not understand it.
So we wrote it out.
Three hundreds and one zero. Add them together. Divide by four. We did the long division by hand. I asked him how many times four goes into thirty. He hesitated.
“Can I count backward?” he asked.
Yes.
And he did.
In that moment, I saw something awaken — not just arithmetic, but reasoning. Ownership. The willingness to stay with a problem instead of escaping it.
Our conversation had begun earlier that morning with teachers — with how classrooms feel different now. Teachers operate under layers of visibility: cameras, policies, community commentary, social media reactions. There is more oversight, more administrative structure, more housekeeping. In some cases, children arrive less prepared for independence than they once did.
Authority today is often negotiated.
Expectation is sometimes softened.
And yet children themselves are no less capable.
They are still wired for growth.
Still able to memorize poetry.
Still able to draw maps with care.
Still able to wrestle with division.
That morning, my husband and I also talked about reading. He is preparing for his Insurance Producer exam. He admitted that comprehension does not come easily to him. He was taught primarily through sight reading — recognizing whole words rather than decoding them.
“It’s about activity,” I told him.
Skill builds with repetition. Understanding grows with engagement.
I asked him for a word that had always felt difficult.
“Transylvania,” he said.
Instead of simply pronouncing it, I looked up the respelling: tran-sil-VAY-nee-uh. We broke it into syllables. We slowed it down. We found the emphasis.
And the word lost its power to intimidate.
I remembered how we once used dictionaries — studying not only definitions but pronunciation guides, syllable counts, and structure. We were taught to break language apart, to understand how it worked.
When you can see the structure of something, you are no longer afraid of it.
Perhaps that is what those women were really giving us.
Not rigidity.
Not severity.
But foundation.
They required effort.
They required completion.
They required us to stay with difficulty long enough to overcome it.
Their influence did not announce itself loudly. It did not trend. It did not demand recognition.
But decades later, it surfaces at a kitchen table in long division. It surfaces in a husband willing to tackle a difficult word instead of avoiding it. It surfaces in a mother who still believes that struggle is not the enemy of learning, but its companion.
The women who taught me may never know the reach of their work.
But I am still standing on what they built.
And now, so are the ones I am raising.
Decades later, I realize influence is rarely loud. It is the quiet insistence on effort, the patient correction, the standards that ask more than what seems easy.
Perhaps the greatest question we can ask ourselves today is this:
What foundations are we still building, quietly, in the children and adults around us?
