Upper school French students remember that Madame Gathy always found ways to make her students feel comfortable in class, whether it was playing Pictionary before a test, writing all worksheets and tests in Comic Sans or passing around a microphone during oral exercises.

Colleagues remember that she was unfailing in her kindness towards her students and impeccable in her organization of her lessons, creating folders of notes for her students to reference.

Her husband remembers that in addition to keeping up with current news headlines, she was equally up to date on celebrity gossip and Hollywood relationships, with an encyclopedic memory of names and cultural events.

“A message behind whatever she was doing is love what you do and love the children and love yourself doing it,” Gathy’s colleague and upper school French teacher Galina Tchourilova said.

Former upper school French teacher Antoinette Gathy, who taught at The Harker School for 17 years, died on Sept. 26 at 61 after a few weeks of hospitalization.

Gathy, known to most of her students as “Madame Gathy” or simply as “Madame,” taught French classes across all levels and devoted much of her life to her work as a French teacher.

Her passion for teaching created an environment within the classroom where students felt safe to explore the French language and culture. Gathy will be remembered by the upper school community for her kindness towards her students, her quiet confidence and, above all, her love for teaching.

“She helped a lot of students like me actually learn to appreciate French,” Gathy’s former student Amla Rashingkar (11) said. “I just remember her telling me that you don’t have to be the best at everything you do, just do what is the best for you.”

A feature of Gathy’s class that many of her students continue to reference, as well as a testament to Gathy’s dedication to her craft, was her class notes, or “Notes du prof,” which included detailed explanations of various French grammar rules. Organized into meticulous explanations and complete with diagrams and charts, these “Notes du prof” helped students grasp even the most complex concepts in the French rulebook.

“We’re thinking because she left all the files on the computer, maybe we can combine it together—I’m not sure if we can publish it, but at least use it as an internal guide for the students,” Tchourilova said. “I think it would be kind of a thank-you, because we don’t want this knowledge—this mastery, practically—to disappear.”

Gathy grew up in Belgium, with French as her native language. She moved to California in the late 1980s after her parents and her sister had immigrated to the U.S. a few years before. Gathy began teaching in her twenties and worked at a school in the outskirts of Brussels for two decades.

When she moved to the U.S. in the late 1980s, she opened a small French school in her house and offered classes to adults and students alike.

She first joined the Harker faculty in 2000 and taught at the middle school for three years before transferring to the upper school, where, as a teacher of students with varying skill levels, she strove to incorporate engaging pedagogical approaches to her classes.

From history lessons on the origins of French grammar to humorous anecdotes involving the misuse of French words, Gathy captivated her students while ensuring that they understood the lesson at hand.

She retired at the end of the 2016-2017 school year, though she continued teaching as a substitute teacher last year.

“She had a way of commanding your attention in a way that was both subtle and inescapable,” Gathy’s former student Timothy Wang (12) said. “Every time you would leave that classroom, you would feel happy and excited for the next day. You’d feel like you learned something.”

Not only did Gathy devote much of her life to her work as a teacher, she also sought to perfect a unique teaching philosophy that provided each student with a rich understanding of the French language.

She believed in the importance of correcting every homework assignment, offering feedback and commentary along the way, and she also believed that multiple choice questions were inadequate tests of language comprehension, choosing instead to create and grade written tests.

“I always admired her for that incredible dedication that she showed to her kids,” Gathy’s husband, Francis Rubinstein, said. “She didn’t take the easy path, but it was the path that was for her, that was best for her students and [that] let her basically teach the students the best that she absolutely could.”

Although she faced medical hardships in the last three years of her life, Gathy persevered and continued to teach, even after she lost her ability to hear without hearing aids.

“The combination of her dedication and the students’ willingness to put up with a microphone, it really let her continue to teach them for longer than she otherwise might have been able to,” Rubinstein said. “I’m so glad she was able to do that, to keep teaching, because that was really so much her passion.”

Outside the classroom, Gathy was an ardent supporter of numerous social movements, including Trotskyism in the 1970s, and she held to her beliefs with a compassionate tenacity, a trait that stood out to many of her students and colleagues.

“She had very strong points of view, and she would never compromise them,” Tchourilova said. “She would say what she needed to say, but she would never offend anybody. And I think it’s a wonderful combination. I wish we had more people like that.”

Gathy remained “a teacher to the core,” as Rubinstein describes, even after she was hospitalized in September. While recovering from surgery, Rubinstein recalls, the doctors asked her to respond to a series of questions in a cognitive test. As Gathy did not have her hearing aids at the time, Gathy’s sister, Laurence, wrote out the questions in French, one of which was, “What month are we in?”

Because Laurence made a grammatical error in what she wrote, her sister pointed it out and refused to answer the question until Laurence corrected the mistake.

“We were laughing, because we obviously knew that her cognitive functions were definitely back,” Rubinstein said. “Even when she was recovering from a stroke, she was still a teacher.”

Students and faculty were invited to attend a memorial service held in Gathy’s honor at the house of her sister, Laurence Gathy, in Felton, CA, on Oct. 6.

Gathy’s impact extended throughout the Harker community, from colleagues to advisees to students.

“Madame really did leave marks, I think, on all of us, indelible marks that I can’t even begin to describe,” Timothy said. “She was an unforgettable teacher, and I guess what I have to say to her is, ‘Merci, madame, pour tout ce que vous avez fait pour nous, et c’était un honneur d’être votre élève.‘ [Thank you, Madame, for all that you have done for us, and it was an honor to be your student.]”

Gathy is survived by her husband and her sister, as well as nieces and nephews.

The French translation of this article can be found at this link.

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French teacher returns to classroom after semester away battling cancer

This piece was originally published in the pages of Winged Post on Oct. 17, 2018.