50-Year Career in First Grade About to End

Georgia Barrett has three rules for her first-graders, rules that have remained constant for the 50 years she has taught the basics of school life.

They are: Walk. Respect Others. Think!

More than 1,200 students that she has taught in the last five decades probably still remember her rules.

Barrett is retiring when the current crop of young minds advances to the second grade.

Duval County School Board officials don’t know whether Barrett is their oldest or most senior employee, but she has little competition. Most teachers retire after 35 years on the job.

“It’s just that I’ve lasted long,” the 71-year-old teacher said. “They wonder why I kept at it. I love it.”

Barrett, who began teaching in 1943, said the most outrageous event she can recall is the time a boy stuck a thumbtack, point-first, up his left nostril.

“I just happened to glance around and saw the end of it,” Barrett said. She tapped the boy’s shoulder blades until he sneezed and the tack flew out.

Her current class of 26 boys and girls is too sophisticated to do something like that, she said. Television and kindergarten have made them learn faster, she said.

Richard Sigler, 45, and his daughter both had Barrett, who teaches at Hendricks Avenue Elementary School.

“I was in love with her. I remember coloring, trying to impress her with the best I could do,” Sigler said.

They met again almost 40 years later.

“She turned to me and called me by my name: ‘You’re Richard, aren’t you?’ ” she said.

When she leaves at the end of the school year, she plans to travel, visit friends and read Danielle Steele novels.

Until then, she remains, above all, a teacher.

Late one afternoon in class recently, a little hand shot into the air. A young girl announced self-righteously, “Michael said a bad word.”

Barrett did not flinch and did not scold. She merely said, “I’m so sorry.”

Then she and the students returned to their lesson.