Honoring Their Legacy

As we close the school year, we also close a chapter with two incredible people of Assumption High School. Mary Margaret Ralph H’08 and Joyce Koch have dedicated a total of 72 years to Assumption and we are extremely grateful for their impact on our community. Our faculty and staff recently celebrated these two women, highlighting their dedication to each and every one of us. Below is what was shared about each of them.

Mary Margaret Ralph H’08 – 43 years at Assumption 

Mary Margaret is an amazing teacher in and outside of the classroom and has been a unique role model for the students of Assumption High School. Her classroom is a safe haven where everyone is treated with respect and kindness.  Every day, she shows students what it means to live by Mercy values by providing valuable life lessons. As one colleagued described:  She puts her heart and soul into every class she teaches!  

She has the same effect outside of the classroom as well with her homeroom and her extra-curriculars.  As her homeroom partner Kristin Walsh attests, “Having worked side by side in homeroom with her these last four years, the amount she has taught ME about grace, compassion, Assumption, has been outstanding.  I was struck by her approach with young women–how vulnerable, honest, poised, and passionate she is–and it simply reaches these girls to unimaginable depths.” 

While she has held various leadership roles over her many years at AHS such as serving as department chair and senior class moderator, her main priority has always been as “teacher”. She has taught many on the current faculty as one commented, “I had her as a teacher when I was a student and have had the privilege to know her as a colleague. I know from my experience on ‘both sides of the desk’ she is compassionate, caring, and dedicated to her profession and her students.”

Mary Margaret has sustained excellence for 42 years! “She is a reflective practitioner who looks always for the best ways to help her students not only understand but internalize course content, but for her the most significant hallmark of her teaching is her loving relationship with her students. She knows how to talk to kids, and, even more importantly, she know how to listen to kids. And she listens with her heart. And they know it. She has dedicated her whole adult life to teaching and loving Assumption girls and helping them grow into confident women who know that they make a difference. She has really worked with the seniors to develop a sense of gratitude instead of a sense of loss during this pandemic year.” 

Her work with seniors (her true passion) over the years has made her a fixture on senior retreat leading and visiting other retreats to give the “Live the Fourth” talk.  She created the famous senior Life Choices class that she taught for decades and then adapted over the past few years.  And she holds the record for most times being chosen as the faculty speaker at graduation.  Her ability to motivate and inspire students at such a pivotal moment in high school – especially this year as she managed to get the seniors to “make it hard to say goodbye” – is truly beyond measure.  

We thank her for her commitment to her students, her love for education, and her work as a positive role model and a strong woman of Mercy, or as a colleague so beautifully said “for her legacy of dedicated pastoral care and genuine connections with students through a classroom defined by compassion, community, and the story of Mercy.” 

Joyce Koch – 29 years at Assumption 

For over 50 years, she has been a part of our lives. Shaping schools and the students within them. There’s a lot that many of us may not know about Joyce. When asked, Joyce will tell you that she is first and always a teacher. Her first love is teaching, but a close second is helping other teachers teach. More than once she had used this quote, “Tell me I forget, show me I remember, involve me I understand.” Her love of teaching was evident to those that worked with her but also rubbed off on others. After 2 years of marriage her husband decided to leave the business world and become a teacher because, he said, “You look like you are having so much fun.” Both of her daughters are teachers too. One is our own Colleen Murphy. Imagine how many lives this one family has impacted that all started with Joyce’s love of teaching.

She was just 10 years old when she decided to become a teacher. The 4th of 7 children but the first to graduate from college so that she could reach her goal of teaching others. In 1968, just 3 weeks after being married in St. Agnes Church, Joyce began her teaching career at St. Agnes school. She taught 6th grade her first year and then 8th grade the following 6 years. Joyce was certified in both English and Math. She taught English, Religion, Science, and Math while at St. Agnes.

Joyce spent the next 17 years of her career from 1975-1992 at Presentation. She started at Presentation as an English teacher, play director and Newspaper moderator. While at Presentation, Joyce switched from teaching English to Math. In 1982 while still at Pres, Joyce took a Basic Programming class at U of L. Joyce got hooked on computers. Joyce went on to get an Educational Technology degree at Spalding University in 1990.

Joyce taught some Basic Programming and Computer Applications classes at Pres. The Main Library and Joyce worked together to allow Pres students to look up books from the Main Library card catalog from a block away, making Pres the first school in Louisville to access the online catalog and earning them recognition during a press conference with then Mayor Jerry Abramson during the ground-breaking event. Joyce also received 2 Louisville Community Foundation Grants while at Pres. The summer after she left Pres she was hired as a teacher summer intern at the Telecommunications Research Lab on U of L’s Shelby campus to assist with telecommunications conferences held there that summer.

Joyce has been at Assumption for 29 years. She was hired by Karen Russ in the Spring of 1992 to teach computer classes and was part-time Technology Coordinator. Our first internet connection was a single computer in the Boeckmann Lab with a dial-up modem. Joyce didn’t have an office but floated from room to room helping with technology. Technology grew rapidly, and Joyce is the main reason that Assumption is known as a leading school in education technology today.

In 2005 while working full-time for AHS, Joyce was also hired by Intel to travel the country to school districts where she “trained the trainers” on how to effectively integrate technology into the curriculum.

We are amazed by the amount of time she has spent speaking to other schools and researching them to see what technology should be implemented here. Never one to shy away from being on the cutting edge, but also cautious to be smart about these decisions and not do something for the sake of name only.

As she saw the need for more technology training, she implemented the TPOC program. These Technology Points of Contact were teachers who volunteered during their planning periods to be available to teachers in the faculty workroom for help. Of course, that was a time when we didn’t have laptops, but still desktop computers in every classroom and a line along the back wall of the workroom.

As she saw technology growing in our world and in our schools, she saw the need for a new position within the Technology Department. The need to have the voice of a classroom teacher. Someone who understood the needs of the classroom, but also enjoyed technology and troubleshooting problems that teachers might have in their own classes.

She made sure that our infrastructure could handle a 1:1 program, having teachers test what worked and what didn’t. She also studied hard and passed the HP certification test, so that we could fix our own computers and get paid for doing so. Once she was satisfied that we had what we needed, she slowly integrated to 1:1 program over several years with each new incoming class. This helped train the teachers as well as make sure our building was ready for this program. Her role moved from helping teachers to more in the background finding solutions, new hardware and software, and troubleshooting difficult issues.

Through it all, she has always put Assumption 1st. Whether she was here in the middle of the night, weekends, days off. If Assumption needed her, she was here with no questions asked.