A champion of literature and literary history in Milton’s Upper School English department since 1992, Carlotta Zilliax began her career with 17 years as a primary and elementary teacher. Not many could successfully cover the scale from The Runaway Bunny to King Lear, but Carlotta has done so with brio and with a wise appreciation of the Möbius-like continuum that connects the very young with the not quite so young—the let’s-play-grownup first graders with the how-sillycan-we-be-today high-school seniors. At either end of the spectrum, Carlotta knew how to have fun with a class and how to make that fun pay off in learning that would still be there when lessons more rigidly laid out and more soberly arrived at had faded. A visitor to her Warren Hall classroom in recent years might feel at times that he had stumbled into the Junior Building by mistake, such was the raw energy with which her students piled in and the enthusiasm with which they took up a text, as if it were a pet hamster or a box of fi nger paints. Often everyone talked at once, but everyone was talking about the hamster. The air crackled with questions and ideas, and out of the cacophony would emerge, magically, insight and understanding. Carlotta’s philosophy prompted her to lean back and let discussion proceed willy-nilly, but her knowledge was so deep and extensive that she often could not resist leaning forward again and inserting herself opportunistically into the conversation, to the enjoyment and benefit of everyone in the room. A class wrestling with the conundrum of Macbeth’s family history would be treated to an anecdote about how two leads, preparing for a production at Stratford, pasted photos of a dead baby in their lockers; readers of Paradise Lost would learn, succinctly and pointedly, about John Milton’s place in the politics of his time.
Carlotta fed the intellect, encouraged emotional response, and always made room for the comic and the spontaneous, joining the fray herself in dry sallies from behind the schoolmarm façade. Her ways of getting students to enter a text personally and imaginatively were such that she could make middle schoolers like Jane Eyre. Her special love of drama played out not only in Shakespeare and Performing classes but also in the theatricals she occasionally organized for the department. We will dearly miss her pert, businesslike, and incisive presence.
–David Smith, English Department