A lifetime of teaching — through good times and bad

Nancy Jaicks, on the deck of her Ram Island home.

From there, she ended up back in Cambridge, but this time as a student at Radcliffe/Harvard.  “I thought it would be another girls’ school but they were already marching towards the merger. All my classes were with men.” The classes soon came to an end, however, when romance intervened.
At the age of 19, at the end of her sophomore year, she married a Brazilian, as young as she, and moved with him to Saõ Paulo where he had grown up and his family still lived. For the next nine years, she loved her life there, became fluent in Portuguese, taught English as a second language, kept house and raised two sons. They lived in the city but spent weekends at the family’s fazenda (think hacienda in Portuguese). Those were “prefeminist times,” she noted.
Her husband, who worked for IBM, found himself and his family transferred to New York City in the late 60s, in the midst of the Vietnam upheaval and the feminist questioning of “women’s place.” She had been “a good wife” by Latin standards, but now wanted to go on teaching and to do that had to return to school.
She also was the child of fairly left-wing and outspoken parents and “coming back to the states at the time of angry counterculture, I felt like I fit. And the antiwar movement became big in my life. Then I started to teach, was getting my masters’ at the same time … and getting dinner on the table at the right time? That was the beginning of the end of my marriage. A Latin husband and a feminist revolutionary? Could never last together.”
So she found herself, with two children, a single head of household commuting to work an hour each way from New Jersey to Westchester County. In time, she managed to get a job closer to home at Dwight Englewood, a local private school. Her own children were in the same grade she was teaching and that added an extra measure of fun.
She discovered over time that she lacked any background in European history and when she became head of the history department decided that maybe she ought to remedy that instead of just “staying a page ahead of them in the book.”
Married a second time, to David Jaicks, whom she described as a man who loved scholarship, she decided to take advantage of an upcoming sabbatical and with his encouragement began a Ph.D. When it turned out that a year abroad was an essential part of the process, they worked that out as well.
She moved to Lille, lived for a time in Paris, spoke to her husband David on the phone frequently. He managed to visit once a month and they spent some time traveling, until she returned to a joint appointment at New York University in its history department with the department of French studies. No longer teaching 7th graders, her favorites, she was now spending all her time with college seniors and graduate students.
As David entered his 70s, however, the couple began to notice problems; he went to a number of physicians and they all told him he was fine. “But David could make anyone think he was fine,” Nancy noted.
He then went to Presbyterian Hospital for a diagnosis and there he was measured, for the first time, against himself. Seen every few weeks, it became clear that he was losing vocabulary as well as the ability to count backwards, or perform other simple tests, all of which had come easily to him early on. Eventually he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and the teacher had to become the student as well as the caregiver.
“You have to learn how to be a caregiver,” she said, “which isn’t easy when you’re working all day.” She read books and joined self-help groups and found them very useful. “He was such an extraordinary man who had done so much for me. He was an avid reader, I’d had to struggle to keep up with him. Now he was sad because he knew. It was very hard for both of us but you have to come to terms with life.”
He died in 2004 with his family all there — he had bad luck with a terrible disease, but he had a good death.”
Nancy discovered Shelter Island through David and she continues to come to her Ram Island home on weekends and vacations, seeing many of her friends. She is often joined by her sons, now grown of course, and any of her five grandchildren, “all of whom grew up here.” Three of them were avid sailors, spending time at Camp Quinipet, “They went to all the Youth Center programs, played baseball, rode at Hampshire Farms — they loved it here.”
Finally retired from teaching, she has many years, many students, and many areas of expertise to look back upon.