Written by Blake Mathews
This week, I’m saying goodbye to someone. This is difficult for me, not only because I hate saying goodbye, but because I’ve never met this person. She’s a Spanish professor at Harding, the mother of a friend, and from everything I’ve heard in the past few days, a remarkable individual. But Linda Moran deserves more than a skinny little column written by a snarky editor, so I’m going to let some of her old students help me.
“I think that she’s communicated an enthusiasm for both the material and her students’ learning, about not just the literature at hand but for Spanish culture in general. In a word it was really energy that I think distinguished her as a professor, relative to the other professors in the department that I’ve had. She’s unique in her style and I appreciate the communicated concern that she has for students, being both academically and otherwise.”
– Zach Caton
“I had her for Spanish Literature and it was wonderful. She’s very challenging and she just makes the class so interesting. She’s very enthusiastic. She does a good job. When you have a teacher that’s enthusiastic you tend to love the class yourself. We were talking about Don Juan…she’s very passionate about Don Juan and the history of Don Juan and the history of Spanish literature. When there’s a teacher who’s passionate and who doesn’t teach just to teach but teaches because she loves it, it makes the classroom experience so much better.”
-Camille Howard
“Ms. Moran was an experience. You could go to her office and talk to her for two hours. I did it on a regular basis. She always had candy for you. I could talk to her about anything. She was very involved with her students. She was starting a program in southern Mexico and she did the first trip last summer in July and I went on that trip. We did such wonderful things and such great things have happened in the congregation we were working with since then, so many baptisms. I really feel like her being gone from this school is an incredible loss and it really kind of cripples her as well, because there’s so much that she could do for everybody around here, and that she loved doing. She loved her students, she loved the contact with her students…”
– Jordan Hall
“As a student, my experience with her both in the classroom and out — I had an internship in Mexico and she led a group of Harding students to help a church with a Vacation Bible School — and that was really unique for me to see, both being a missions major and in Spanish, it was good to see a professor that took initiative to organize and then execute a trip and involve students. That trip happened because of her and her husband, and I just thought that was an incredible testimony to everything that Harding stands for. … To see that embodied in a professor was really, really encouraging to me. Especially because I can only comment on the professors I’ve had in class, not just in Spanish or the Bible department but in every department, there are precious few professors who will do something like that from what I’ve experienced. It’s a real shame to lose that.”
-Zach Caton
