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Paoli High School

501 Elm St.
Paoli, IN 47454
(812) 723-3905

Uyesugi: A brief history of a teacher

Most people retire in their late fifties.

Mrs. Ruth Uyesugi, novels teacher at our own PHS, has been teaching for fifty-six years in Paoli alone.

But she hasn’t always been here.  She officially started her teaching career at a school in Oregon, but was only allowed to work one semester before being fired because of her marriage to a Japanese man, Dr. Edward Uyesugi.

Undeterred, she got a job here at Paoli and never looked back.

Uyesugi found her love of teaching at a very early age, substituting both in middle school and high school classrooms being nothing more than a student herself.

After high school, she pursued this love of teaching, taking Latin as her major in college.  Also being well versed in the Spanish language, she taught the Spanish class at Paoli, along with Journalism, English and Latin beginning in 1955.

Throughout her early adult life, Uyesugi traveled the world with her husband, going to Japan, Hawaii and Latin America twice apiece.  Her husband lectured and played the role of optometrist, fitting and providing glasses for people all over the U.S.  With him, she had three children: Dr. Edward Uyesugi Jr., Col. Dan Uyesugi and Ann Uyesugi.

Uyesugi considers her greatest contribution to PHS to be the forty-three years that she sponsored the school paper, the Paolite.  During this time, the paper earned many prestigious awards such as the All-American honors from the National Scholastic Press Association in 1986, 1989 and 1991.  She was also the first high school teacher to ever be inducted into the Journalism Hall of Fame.

“My students entered my name and surprised me,” she said about how she was nominated for the distinguishing award.

She’s also an accomplished writer herself, publishing her novel Don’t Cry, Chiisai, Don’t Cry in 1978.

This, of course, is simply one small part in the grand legacy of Ruth Uyesugi.  As of yet, she can’t see herself doing anything other than teaching and passing down her literary knowledge to a whole new generation of students eager to learn from a master of the craft.

By Jacob Coe

Photo by Breanna Daugherty

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  • C

    Chris KnightSep 30, 2011 at 2:13 PM

    Oh! By the way, I still love you too, Jacob!
    Chris Knight

    Reply
  • C

    Chris KnightSep 30, 2011 at 2:08 PM

    Let Mrs. U see my comment and see if she notices that I misspelled “speling”.

    Chris Knight

    Reply
  • C

    Chris KnightSep 30, 2011 at 2:06 PM

    I had the honor of being a student of Mrs. U almost 30 years ago. We would tease her by guessing her age to be over 100 years. She would endure our ribbing with poise and grace. She seemed to enjoy our jokes as much as we did. She taught us much more than just English. My first assignment in her class was to write my philosophy of life. She graded us on grammar and speling, not on our ideology. It’s a good thing because I would have failed miserably. I had a terrible outlook on life.
    My last assignment in her class was to write my philosophy of life again. She asked us to compare it to our original paper that we had written several months earlier to see if we had changed. I can’t imagine anyone emerging from her class unchanged. She not only taught us to use better grammar and syntax. She also taught us to be better human beings. She instilled in us the belief that we could forge our own destinies, and for that I will always be indebted to her. I still love you, Mrs. U !!!

    Chris Knight
    Class of 1983

    Reply