Jarmila Jackson, Features Writer

Hazel Patterson - photo by Jarmila Jackson

Some teachers can't wait to retire. As soon as they hit 65, they're out the door. Not Hazel Pearl Patterson though. She is all of 90 years old and still an active educator.

Her home at Cadot Close in Kingston is decorated with plaques and trophies. On the coffee table sits a badminton trophy, won when she was 83 years old.

"I love teaching, it doesn't matter who, even old people. I love the man on the street just as much as the students".

A lifetime of changes

Patterson spent time reflecting on a lifetime filled with changes. Growing up in the house of a white colonial secretary, she was exposed to discrimination very early. Her mother, who had the fairest complexion of all her grandmother's children, was sent to live and work in the household, where she kept her child, Hazel, the dark-skinned daughter of a Maroon, a secret for a long time. The secret was exposed when Hazel unwittingly revealed herself by walking stark naked into the dinning hall filled with guests.

"I slept with her [her Mother], but they were responsible for me. As I grew up, they sent me to church, but they never attempted to send me to school and I realised I was a negro coming up in the colonial secretary's house," said Patterson. "I was given all the presents any child could get, but never a book," she recalled.

"There I was, working in the library and nobody said, here's a book, try to read it".

It was, perhaps, this early deprivation of knowledge that led her to become a teacher.

Taught at 10 schools

During her career, Patterson has worked at no less than 10 schools. She spent more than 30 years at the Dallas All Age School, St. Andrew improving the initially pitiable facilities there. "It was one big old desk, no playing field, one big old church bench and it's a school going from 18-something. It was right in front of the Ministry. I was taking school in the morning, afternoon, evenings and nights. I broke down, but I didn't tell anybody, I couldn't do so much, " she said.

"I carried a big old governor grip, but was anything in the grip?" she snickered. "I walked seven and a half miles with my grip."

She officially retired around 70, but, finding her indispensable, the ministry sent her to Golden Spring, where she spent another five years. "I left there at 75 and the children started to follow me from there up. All I had was an ackee tree to put them under".

Patterson has since been holding evening classes in mathematics at her home.