Christine Amelia Ruffin Waller, who died of lung cancer Saturday at home in Richmond, was born 82 years ago in Reedville, one of three children of a minister-educator and his wife. Growing up near the water, she graduated in 1942 from Julius Rosenwald High School, where her father was principal. African-Americans in the area raised more than $7,000 to build the school, which opened as Northumberland County Training School, seven years before her birth. With additional funding from the Rosenwald Fund, created by Sears, Roebuck & Co. Chairman Julius Rosenwald to finance building of rural Southern schools for blacks, it became, in 1932, one of 308 Rosenwald schools in Virginia and one of about 5,000 in the South.

Don’t real leaders stand up and do the right thing in the face of pressure, no matter where that pressure comes from (in this case from President Obama’s Treasury Department)? This is the same Dodd who, while head of the Senate Banking Committee, received below-market rates for mortgages from Countrywide Finance and now faces a Senate ethics investigation. Don’t real leaders take the moral high road, particularly when no one is looking?

Teachers with subject-matter expertise should be paid in part based on the subject matter they teach. Math and science experts, for instance, command greater pay in the private sector than art or literature experts.

Peabody Middle School’s 2008 Teacher of the Year, Betty Knight, was scheduled to receive a special honor on Thursday, March 12 at 3:10 p.m.. A representative of Horace Mann, an insurance corporation for the educational community, will present Knight with its Crystal Apple award. The Crystal Apple award recognizes teaching excellence at the local level. The program is designed to be flexible. Together, school administrators and Horace Mann representatives set the criteria for winning the award. Recipient qualifications could include dedication, assertiveness, enthusiasm, and use of creative and innovative techniques.

Richard Bryant Anthony Sr. was a volunteer firefighter in the 1960s. Principal Richard Bryant Anthony Sr. used to say he was “gray and blue through and through.“ Douglas Freeman High School was his school, and the students, staff members and parents were his children, said his son, Richard Anthony Jr. One night when Anthony Jr. was home from college, the alarm system at the school went off. The two set off to investigate in the family Jeep.

Elsie Holland loved to learn, and translated that virtue into a passion for teaching. At home in simple classrooms or corridors of power, Holland taught by example. Her life defined citizenship. Holland was born in Dinwiddie and graduated from an all-black high school there. At 19 she earned her bachelor’s degree from Virginia State, where she also earned her master’s. She earned her doctorate in education from the University of Virginia.

Russian warships recently steamed into waters off Venezuela, where they participated in exercises with Hugh Chavez’s mighty armada. The first Russian naval operation in the region since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the so-called provocation was as threatening as toy ships in a bathtub. As noted by Anne Applebaum on today’s Op/Ed page, neither President Bush nor President-elect Obama seems perturbed. Russia possesses considerable military assets, yet it is not nearly so strong as the former Soviet Union. Although Moscow cannot be ignored, this is not 1962 revisited.