Praise from Dr. Kurt W. S. Smith

During my years of teaching, I crossed paths with remarkable students who left a lasting impression. One such student was Kurt Smith, class of 2006 at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus.

Mississippi has many talented people, and a few develop their aptitudes to the fullest extent and become excellent professionals and outstanding Americans who love what they do for a living and return to Mississippi to pass on the baton of excellence.

During my twenty years at MSMS I have fond memories of students like Jennifer S., who became a successful engineer and marathon runner, Ben H., financial advisor and excellent Mercedes mechanic. Shannah T. H. advocates for rare diseases, giving platform to those who had no voice before and saving her daughter in the process; Melissa H., an excellent elementary school teacher and long-distance runner and an avid world traveler; Melissa M. A., excellent mother of three boys and an advocate for juvenile diabetes. Some former students are gifted engineers and doctors who care for all Americans. Bryan, a young medical doctor with a Ph.D. in medicine, studies prions in mad cow disease; Joe S. and his friend Michael H. whom we took to baseball games at MSU are medical doctors, saving women’s lives; Katie D., excellent RN and mother of five; the Italian class I took to Ole Venice (18 miles away) as a reward for earning college credit through a standardized test; Emily S., a medical researcher; and Nate W., an engineer who runs his wife’s medical practice in rural Alabama. These are just a few of the students who left a clear and lasting imprint in my fond memories.

This May 2024, Kurt W. S. Smith earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics after an undergraduate in German and International Studies, with a minor in Italian and Spanish, a master’s degree in German and Teaching English as a Second Language, and another master’s degree in business administration. He also worked for more than ten years in higher education administration at Ole Miss.

Kurt’s doctoral dissertation dealt with the “utilization of authentic reading materials in ESL textbooks and the role that textbook-based tasks serve in enabling language classrooms to mirror the target environment.”

Kurt proposed a “new Continuum of Authenticity Scale technique to measure the authenticity of materials in textbooks beyond the current binary model.”

At his dissertation defense, Kurt thanked “my MSMS language professor, Dr. Ileana Johnson, for inspiring me with a zeal for language learning and for modeling authenticity in the classroom environment.”

Kurt wrote on the MSMS alumni webpage, “Dr. Johnson was the kind of professor who, in addition to teaching me in German class, also let me sit in on her Italian and Latin classes because my schedule was too full to formally register for them, and she privately taught me and another student Russian lessons during her office hours. The earliest foundations of my dissertation were rooted in how she would bring in sales receipts, brochures, newspaper clippings, and other seemingly mundane artifacts from foreign cultures as windows of authenticity for students to see true representations of language as it is actually used in the target environment as opposed to a reliance on the completely pedagogically invented texts found in textbooks, with their invented characters, invented scenarios, inauthentic passages, and obviously fake dialogues. Indeed, her subtle rebellious contempt at having to use a textbook in the first place helped to shatter the within-the-box thinking that had been instilled in me for the prior ten years before attending MSMS. (What? But how can you have a class without a textbook? You can’t question the paradigm.)” It turns out that she could.

Ten years later, as a researcher-teacher, Kurt described how he scrapped the textbook for the course he taught and developed an “open-source course packet instead, filled with authentic materials from the target language and culture that complimented the learning objectives of the course, expanding on the approach Dr. Johnson so effectively modeled.”

Kurt celebrated his doctoral graduation with a pilgrimage trip to Italy with his family and was pleasantly surprised how easily the “language came back to me, with vivid memories of how I learned functional words and authentic language skills in Dr. Johnson’s class.”

Posting on the MSMS alumni website, Dr. Kurt Smith wrote, “I just wanted to share with the rest of the MSMS family how impactful and life-changing the MSMS experience was for me, and how the passion and personality of one phenomenal professor set me on a path to improving humanity’s understanding of language pedagogy.”

As a life-long teacher and a consummate professional for thirty years, I had seldom received praises or recognition from my colleagues, the dean, or the professional field in MS for a job well done, nor did I amass the Department of Education certificates on the “I love myself educational wall” other than my four college diplomas which I earned while raising a family of four as a single mom. I was content with the stellar results of my students.

Kurt’s writing brought tears to my eyes and made me realize that some of my students did recognize the quality education they received from me. And Kurt is a shining example of my exceptional students.