Joyce Temple Ward
1943-2008
Joyce Temple Ward lived her entire life in Nashville, where she was born in 1943. She graduated with high honors from George Peabody College in 1965 and three years later began a teaching career that would last forty-one years, first at Franklin High School, then for the next thirty-seven years at Harpeth Hall School. For fifteen of those years she was the chair of the Foreign Languages Department. Her love of antique lands was shared with her students during fifteen trips of study abroad from 1983 to 2006. Not only did her students receive expert guidance around Italy, Greece, and Egypt, but they were also admitted through the iron gates of Chicago House, the home of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute's Epigraphic Survey at Luxor. Honors fell upon Mrs. Ward throughout her career: she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year at her school in 1984, the same year that she was named Tennessee Latin Teacher of the Year by the Tennessee Foreign Language Teachers Association. She was the first holder of the Owen Chair for Excellence in Teaching in 1994 and three years later was given the Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence by Peabody College. A devoted member of CAMWS, she retained in her library nearly thirty-five years' worth of Classical Journal. She died on August 18, 2008, after a valiant battle with a rare form of t-cell lymphoma.
— Ward Briggs