According to the New York State Union of Teachers, slightly more than one-third of the state’s public school educators are set to retire soon or already have. Add to that declining student enrollment rates and astronomical home prices — a topic we’re well familiar with on the East End — and a subsequent drop in young adults entering the teaching field (or just burning out fast), and it appears we have both a practical and, perhaps, existential crisis on our hands.

There are so many reasons for all of this, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about, nor am I qualified to do so. Still, in difficult times we all wish for a miracle, or a superhero, to save the day. In the face of it all, I can’t help but wish for an army of Patricia Tait McNallys — although one of her was certainly force enough.

On Feb. 12, McNally passed away in Naples, Fla. Some knew her initially as Mrs. Mothner; some of us called her Mrs. McNally, her name from her second marriage to then-Shelter Island High School social studies teacher, Robert McNally. It breaks my heart that there’s an entire generation or two of Islanders who called her by neither of these names — who have no idea who she was or her exacting standards for diagramming sentences or her infectious joy in teaching Chaucer. In the way she pushed our little small-town yearbook, Pogatticut, to award-winning standards with the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the National Press Association. In the way she changed lives, like mine.

All of that is, of course, just words — but words to Patricia Tait McNally were everything. And she made them everything to me. I am who I am today in large part because of Patricia McNally. It’s just a pure, indisputable fact. Oh, if she saw that I started a sentence with a conjunction! I would quote her own words back to her, with a sly grin: “You need to master the rules in order break them.” She was talking about grammar, but I suspect she was talking about lots of things in life. Born in Jackson Heights, Queens, on April 15, 1940, Patricia Alyce Tait was raised by a single mom who came north from Wells, Ala., where a young Patricia would spend summers at her grandmother’s home. “She had a complete belief that she was Scout,” her eldest son, Josh Mothner, said in a recent phone conversation from his home in Marathon, Fla., referencing one of his mother’s favorite books, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In addition to falling in love with great Southern writers, that time spent below the Mason-Dixon line allowed her to bear witness firsthand to the deeply ingrained injustices of racism and the importance of education to battle it.

It informed the path she took as an educator and created a tough-love approach to her teaching methods, swatting aside well-worn excuses like unwanted insects invading her classroom. She pushed her students to work hard, and then harder. To be their best.

She graduated from Hunter High School in Manhattan and then Drew University, where she majored in English. An interim job as a secretary at Look magazine led her to meet and marry Ira Mothner, a senior editor there who shared her fire-in-the-belly sense of personal accountability and duty to fight injustice.

She landed her first teaching job in East Harlem at John S. Roberts Junior High School in the 1960s, where she taught English literature to the predominantly Black and Latino student body and became their yearbook advisor.

“She used to have the kids come to our apartment to work on the yearbook,” Mr. Mothner remembered. “We had this old Irish doorman who’d call up and say, ‘Uh, there’s a bunch of kids here who want to come up to your apartment. Are they supposed to be here?’ And my parents would say, ‘Yes, send em up!’” They’d pore over the words and images, laying out the pages on the kitchen table and working together into the night to create something of which they could all be proud.

Raised as a Methodist, Patricia became familiar with Shelter Island when her mom sent her to Camp Quinipet in the summertime, and it was here the island made its first indelible imprint upon her. She and Ira eventually bought a little house in Silver Beach and, when Look magazine folded, decided to move Josh and his brother, Jon, to Shelter Island fulltime in 1972.

During that first year, she landed a position teaching at Riverhead High School. By the start of the 1973, Patricia was ensconced as the English and, briefly, social studies teacher for junior high school students on Shelter Island, eventually splitting the English and American literature education of grades 7 through 12 with the wonderful Richard Herbert. In 1974, she took over as yearbook advisor.

Source: The Suffolk Times