I have taught in public schools for over 25 years. Thousands of students have come through my classroom doors to hopefully engage in lessons to help them read more closely, write with more voice, speak more eloquently, and listen to others more attentively.

And in every class on every school day, each of those students was directly and indirectly being co-taught by Dr. Joseph Milner.

There is no other person besides my Uncle Mike who has had a more profound influence on the teacher I have been, am today, and will be hopefully for years to come.

I live in the very city where I completed a graduate program that he created for educating teachers, teaching a subject that he taught still using methods and pedagogical tools that he freely gave to me.

I can’t imagine trying to fathom how many students in this state and in this country who have in various degrees of separation been influenced by his teaching. If I have taught for two and half decades, then there are countless other teachers that he has mentored, taught, and advised who have gone on to teach their own students for decades.

But there is more than just what he did as a teacher and professor. He was as consistently attuned to people outside the classroom and never left a doubt that to engage with him was to engage with one of the most genuine and authentic people God ever created. Once you were his student, you were always his student – not to assess but to encourage and offer counsel.

To know Dr. Milner is to also know his family. I went through graduate school with his youngest son. I sat in a Latin class as an undergraduate with his middle son and even heard a sermon or two from him. His oldest son may not remember a conversation in front of Tribble Hall one summer at an AP Institute, but I sought him out because he had an acute understanding of what I was going through at that time – the doubt and fear surrounding a prenatal diagnosis for a child to come that fall with a genetic disorder.

It is no wonder that the AP Institute I attended was directed by Dr. Milner. It also seems appropriate that the very child I became a father to now attends the very high school where Dr. Milner’s children graduated.

Yet, it always seemed that besides being a father and teacher, Dr. Milner might admit his greatest achievement was marrying his wife, Lucy, who is as giving and loving as any person I have known and as professionally accomplished as her husband. With him, they literally molded the Governor’s School Program into what it is today. And just think of the number of students that program has helped to grow as scholars and people.

When I hopefully go to the “Great-Here-After”, I would like to thank Dr. Milner for one one other thing. For a brash country kid from rural Georgia and the only child of a young single mother, he became a great role model for people like me. Not just in being a good teacher

But being a person who has a family that openly loves and supports one another through all that life brings and still take that excitement in the classroom.

I so needed him to teach me.

In honor of Dr. Milner, his family and Wake Forest University have established an endowment to help fund a scholarship to help future students.

Thank you, Dr. Milner.