A Life of Service and Dedication

In Memoriam  

ANJA S. GREER
May 27, 1943—April 21, 1998
Chair of the Mathematics Department

_Among the notes and letters mailed to Peter Greer after Anja’s death was a card with lines inspired by Russian poetry:

When Anja Greer died in April 1998, it was difficult for us to step beyond our own sadness, difficult for us to embrace that abiding gratitude that inevitably would follow. Surely, we were and are grateful that Anja had walked among us. We understood that hers had been a life of service and dedication marked by an unmistakeable intelligence, compassion, and creativity. In a career that embraced the full range of boarding school life, she taught math, coached crew, served as residential adviser and dorm head, worked as associate dean of students, and, at the end, chaired the Department of Mathematics.

Were we to attempt to take the measure of Anja’s life, we might just examine the facts. We might say, for instance, "Here is Anja Greer, Anja Greer by the primary numbers." Life before Exeter found an 18-year-old Anja graduating from Wappingers Central High School in Wappingers Falls, New York. She began college as a music major at the State University of New York at Potsdam, and, two years later, transferred to Albany, where she majored in math.

Anja arrived at Exeter in 1974, having taught at Emma Willard and at Timberlane Regional High School. She raised two sons, Vinnie and Greg, who both earned Academy diplomas. In 1982, she married Peter Greer and, with that marriage, became stepmother to Peter’s daughter Alexa. In the decade of the ’90s, with the births of Greg’s children, Anja became a grandmother to Jacob and Melissa.

Anja’s career at the Academy spanned 24 years, nearly a quarter of a century of Harkness classes and math tests and extra-help sessions. In her life beyond the classroom, she attended more than 200 performances and rehearsals of the Boston Symphony. In her gardens–and here we have an exact count–she planted 17,297 bulbs, seeds, seedlings, plants, trees, and shrubs. Indeed, Anja’s plantings–spaced no more than 12 inches apart–would stretch from the Greer home in Kensington to the top of High Street in Amesbury, Massachusetts.

Were Anja seated in her customary front-row chair at faculty meeting, she might be the first to challenge these numbers, or, perhaps the first to expand upon them. She could, as one of our colleagues recalls, "make up facts with the best of us."

But the "facts," for Anja, were simply a means to a greater end. Always the teacher, she would urge us beyond the numbers themselves. "Let’s look," she would say, "at the human element."

For ironically, Anja never really thought of herself as a mathematician. Her impulse, her generosity of spirit, prompted her to recognize the mathematical talent of certain colleagues and to minimize her own considerable skill. What, then, are we to do with the testimony of one of our most brilliant recent graduates? In a note to Peter, written shortly after Anja’s death, this Exonian recalls a brief story about Mrs. Greer in a class where she was substituting for two weeks for a colleague. She "taught us some discrete mathematics, among which was a piece of college level mathematics . . . that she arrived at through, what I can now look back at retrospectively and say was, a stunning, beautiful proof; at the time, I didn’t realize it, but it printed (itself) in my mind for years until I was able to understand why it worked in the conventional vein. I’ve never seen something so well crafted. . . . I believe she arrived at it independently–and she tossed it off as if it were of little remark."

If Anja did not view herself as a mathematician, she did, however identify herself as a teacher of math, and she must have understood–even if modesty forbade any open recitation of it–that she stood in the first rank of Academy teachers. How many students must have felt like the young graduate who remembers Mrs. Greer "never stopped believing in me. . . . I could always rely on Mrs. Greer." Anja championed those who needed a champion. She rejoiced in the opportunity to work with students whose greatest talents blossomed in disciplines other than her own. If a student was struggling in mathematics, he could find a patient, compassionate teacher in Anja Greer. As one student recalled, Anja "explained a mathematical concept in so many different ways that, in terms of probability, we had to understand some of them. . . . Before we could even protest that calculus is impossible, we understood it. She made it so easy. And when calculus begins to be easy, calculus can even begin to be fun."

And through the joy of the classroom, through the joy of learning, Anja reached into countless young lives. Anja posited unwavering faith in the students under her charge. As one former student recalls, "She expected us to struggle; she demanded that we look ahead; she knew we would succeed. She had such confidence in me that I had no choice but to have faith in myself. Her enthusiasm was contagious."

Anja’s influence also asserted itself in the adult community. She championed her causes with the same intelligence and zeal that defined her work in the classroom. She was one of those rare human beings who dared to act upon her principles, and those principles were rooted in a democratic vision that sought to make Exeter a better place for everyone. She was often at her best in faculty meetings where her impassioned, extemporaneous speeches commanded absolute attention. Many of us share the remembrances of one former colleague who thrilled at Anja’s "battles with the faculty at those tedious Wednesday meetings. There were a couple of us underlings who secretly cheered her on as she would stand up and hold forth for a principle, for a student, for a weakling, for a cause, and we would thrill to her fearlessness and her courage and her articulateness . . . and while she too seemed to recognize the inherent flaws in the system, she managed to rise above them . . . I admired her tremendously and always thought of her as carrying around a bat which she would swing whenever she needed to."

Yes, she could take that Louisville slugger and lay low the opposition, but she didn’t always swing from the hip. She had the total game and could, when necessary, lay down a perfect sacrifice bunt. While her fiery passion might arouse passionate response, she believed in the principles of inclusion and respect. Her tenacity and vision drew colleagues to her side as she became the chief architect for programs conceived ahead of their time. She willed into being the Sampler Program, diagnostic testing for students with special learning needs, peer tutoring, and math help. Long before the Academy was eager to embrace summer programs for adults, Anja created the Mathematics and Technology Conference that was, in 1997, renamed in her honor, the Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics and Technology. When the Academy introduced the Exeter Mathematics Summer Institute for Urban Teachers, Anja was among the original faculty. She also served on a National Council of Teachers of Mathematics task force that developed a series of six books on assessment. The text that Anja co-edited, scheduled for publication in the spring, is dedicated to her in recognition of her "experience and expertise, innovative ideas, and keen sense of pragmatism." One colleague, writing in the vernacular of team sports, dubbed Anja an "impact player," indeed the kind of player around whom one builds a franchise. The Academy honored this franchise player by naming her a recipient of the Rupert Radford Faculty Fellowship in 1992 and the Brown Prize in 1995. That same year, she and Peter were jointly honored as students dedicated the PEAN to them.

Essential to any team, to any community, is a sense of belonging, of being valued. Perhaps because she was among the first women employed as Academy teachers and because she understood the importance of hiring and retaining a richly diverse faculty, Anja strove to make all colleagues–and especially new colleagues–feel welcome. For years, she, Peter, and other faculty members have hosted an annual soup party at the Greer home in Kensington. The welcome, warm and genuine, bespoke a hospitality that helped draw teachers, new to Exeter, into the Academy community.

Anja, no doubt, never lost sight of the particular difficulties women faced in establishing themselves at a school which, for most of its history, had been exclusively male. She believed that she and her female colleagues could do anything and everything that male teachers did in a residential school. If classroom teachers were expected to coach, then Anja would coach. It mattered not, for instance, that she knew absolutely nothing about girls crew. With a toughness and tenacity that would characterize her entire career, she threw herself into learning to become a crew coach. Here was a woman with no background in rowing, working in a program with almost no facilities, in a sport that attracted only a handful of girls, including, we might note, future Olympian Anne Marden. Anja made what one veteran coach considers a "tremendous contribution as a founder of girls rowing." Her unflagging energy, her willingness to give 100 percent to those early morning or late evening rows, earned her the respect and admiration of her girls. She helped to instill a sense of accomplishment and provided those young athletes with a strong role model. In the best spirit of a faculty-run school, Anja recognized the need for someone to step forward: fledgling girls crew needed a coach; Anja coached.

A role model for the girls under her charge, Anja also modeled behavior for her peers. One colleague recalls that when she first came to the Academy, she felt a bit intimidated by Anja, but, as she came to know her, came to know Anja’s intellect, kindness, and devotion to students, she learned that here was a woman she could turn to for sound advice.

To know Anja was to be drawn into the world of her rich and varied interests. The circle of her friendship encompassed many passions. There was her love of music, the trips to Boston for the symphony, the evenings at Phillips Church for student concerts and recitals. There was bird-watching with Peter, the two of them–bird books in hand, binoculars around the neck–often accompanied by close friends. There was the world of travel: on sabbatical, circling the globe with Peter; on vacation, venturing to Switzerland or Hawaii or Sanibel Island. There were the trips to the U.S. Open, trips to root for Martina and Steffi and Venus. There were those Sunday afternoons spent cheering for the Pats and all those evenings watching the Celtics. There was even spectator golf, a passion that came to the front with the emergence of Tiger Woods. There were ice skating shows and flower shows and shopping at the malls. And there were her gardens, her magnificent gardens. Had Anja not been a teacher, she might well have made her way as a landscape architect. She had the artist’s eye for color and shape and texture. And, of course, she also had Peter to haul and dig and hoe. And she had Vinnie and Greg and Lexi and others of us to weed and weed and weed some more.

And it was to this home that Anja journeyed for the final days of her life. Anja, whose career had been defined by compassion and an intelligence of purpose, by a deep and abiding passion for life, fought valiantly to defeat the cancer that was ravaging her body. To the end, she was the teacher, teaching us the meaning of courage and grace.

Anja touched more lives than she could possibly have imagined. We, her colleagues and friends, are grateful that a woman of her integrity, decency, and vision walked among us.

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