By Craig Williams

Question: Who leaves a comfortable retirement, with their feet up at home, after teaching math for 30-years, decides to add a 45-minute round-trip commute to an economically unnecessary work day, and crosses state lines in order to help young learners get a better grip on one of the most elusive languages in all of academics?

Answer: Lisa Harris, that’s who.

For more than three years, Mrs. Harris has been teaching the language of math at Meridian High School. She’s a math teacher, for sure, but she’s so much more than that. Along with the formal responsibility of teaching math to students in grades 9 through 12, she’s also teaching confidence, hope and, to complete this soft-skills trifecta, she is teaching about possibility-thinking and the doors it can open.

You won’t find any of this in her job description and it doesn’t appear on any worksheets or in any textbooks, but she brings it with her from across the river to Meridian every day.

When Mrs. Harris first arrived here three years ago, she wanted to get to know her students, so she’d ask them where they were from, where they’d grown up, where they lived. Some of the students told her that they were just from Mounds or just from Pulaski, or just from out in the county, and that they’d always just attended Meridian.

That didn’t sit well with her.

The place a person is from and the school a person attends is not a “just” sort of thing, it’s a thing of pride, and she immediately told them so.

As social creatures, we do tend to see ourselves in the way the world defines us and, if we’re not careful, we can buy into a lot of negative messaging we’d never intended to. But Mrs. Harris is a back-stop for that kind of noise.

If she’d have turned out to be a Beach Boy instead of a math teacher, she wouldn’t have just written, “Be True To Your School,” but something tells me she’d have written “Be True To Your Town,” and “Be True To Your Self,” as well!

Pythagoras may have had his theorem, but Mrs. Harris adds layers of value to her students’ understanding of Euclidean geometry and much, much more. She’s helping her students see possibilities beyond the math, beyond the limits imposed by others, and beyond the self-doubt that can often take root without a teacher like Mrs. Harris.

As our interview was winding down, I asked Mrs. Harris what drives her, why she does what she does after working an entire career across the river, and she made it crystal clear to me.

“I wasn’t finished. It’s not about how much math they learn, it’s not about how much math I teach ’em, it’s about what kind of person they become. I just wasn’t finished. What motivates me is my students. That’s why I’m here.”

And if I may put it just as clearly, the Meridian School community is mighty fortunate that she is.