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Passion For Teaching Inspires Barb Duncan To Teach To All Ages

Jacob McCleland
/
KRCU

If you’ve walked into a watercolor class at a hospital or assisted living center in Cape Girardeau, you’ve probably seen Barb Duncan at work. At 79 years old, the retired teacher is still going strong and continues to spread her love of art and learning.

Duncan flits across the activity room at the Lutheran Home assisted living center, carefully inspecting watercolor paintings of beaches. Her pupils, about a 15 or so older adults, show off their nascent masterpieces one-by-one, with palm trees, blue waters and little representations of themselves on the sand.

“It’s beautiful! They may sell them. I bet that’s an expensive hat there,” Duncan told one student in praise. “That’s not a plain old straw hat there. Good job." Turning to a near man, she asks if he too plans to include a hat.

Though technically retired, Duncan is as busy as ever. Teaching is in her blood. She’s still a substitute teacher in Jackson, and she volunteers countless hours to art classes at places like Southeast HEALTH, St. Francis Medical Center, Heartland Rehab and the Lutheran Home.

“If they are ill, or they have problems on their mind, it gives them a time of relaxation and it’s just fun to watercolor,” Duncan said. “It’s fun. You never know for sure. We do structure it, our pictures, our subject area, but still yet they have the freedom to create.”

Barb Duncan spent most of her teaching career with young students. She spent 25 years teaching math and science in Chaffee, and then taught education at Southeast Missouri State University for 16 years. There, she often taught how to incorporate art into other disciplines. Now, many of her pupils are on the other end of the age spectrum.

“It keeps them active. It keeps their creative genes working, whether they put it on a paper, or they paint a wall, or whatever they paint, or they draw on a chalkboard or they draw on a sidewalk. Anything to express themselves, express their feelings,” Duncan said.
 
All this would have seemed unlikely just ten years ago, when Duncan suffered a stroke while teaching class at the university. Her students noticed her mouth drooping and asked if she was OK, but Duncan just kep

on talking. She wound up in the hospital.

“I had to learn to walk, talk, speak. I had to learn to drink out of a straw,” Duncan said. “I was stricken with my stroke.”

Despite this, Barb Duncan was back in front of a classroom in about 30 days, with the help of a walker. Duncan doesn’t back down from a challenge, be it a stroke or an opportunity to learn something new, like Ukrainian egg art- a craft she still teaches.

And she likes to take on physical challenges as well.

“When I was 40 years old, I began to water ski. When I was 50, I began to fly an airplane. I took private lessons out here at the Cape Airport. I never flew higher than 8,000 feet,” Duncan said. “When I was 60, I had the privilege of going to Russia. At that time I was teaching sixth grade in Chaffee and we got an exchange program going with my sixth graders and their sixth graders in art and they exchanged art. When I was 70, my husband were in Hawaii and we started snorkeling.”

Next year, when she hits 80, Duncan has even more ambitious plans.

“I think I’m going to shoot for the moon if they bring the prices down just a little bit so I can get on a spaceship and go to the moon.”
 

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