Shirley Resnick, 85, mother and teacher

Shirley Resnick, 85, of Haverford, a retired elementary schoolteacher and mother of three with a wide circle of friends and a lifelong passion for early-childhood learning, died Saturday, April 4, after a year-and-a-half-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Mrs. Resnick remained active until nearly the end and continued her weekly reading sessions with students at Stratford Friends School until just recently, said her daughter, Rhonda Cohen.

Mrs. Resnick's son-in-law, David Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast Corp. and onetime chief-of-staff to then-Mayor Ed Rendell, said she devoted her life to supporting family and friends.

"My mother-in-law was not famous in the traditional sense of the word, but she's had a much bigger impact on the world than most famous people I know," Cohen said. "She was the most constructively nurturing person I have ever met, nurturing her children, her family, and friends, and nurturing the children she taught."

Mrs. Resnick was born in Trenton and raised in West Philadelphia, where she attended West Philadelphia High School. She attended Pennsylvania State University, but after meeting her future husband, Martin, she enrolled at Temple University, where he was a student. The couple married after graduating and bought a house in Havertown in 1950. They raised their children there and Mrs. Resnick remained in that house for 64 years. Her husband, a lawyer in Philadelphia, died in 1993.

Mrs. Resnick gave up full-time teaching to devote herself to raising her family, but she returned to being a full-time educator as her children grew older.

Rhonda Cohen, a former partner at the Ballard Spahr law firm, said that her parents did little traveling while they were raising children but that her mother went on a number of trips later in life, visiting China, Australia, the Galapagos Islands, Africa, and Israel, often with a group of female friends with whom she was close.

She kept a map of the world at home and dotted it with pushpins marking the places she'd visited.

On her trips abroad, she often picked up mementos and souvenirs for children she taught.

She had varied interests, Rhonda Cohen said. When Mrs. Resnick's son Stuart, a computer consultant in Berkeley, Calif., came to visit, the two would travel to Atlantic City, where Mrs. Resnick invariably played slot machines while her son played poker.

"She dedicated her life to helping her family and to helping kids," Rhonda Cohen said. "Those were really the two most important things in her life, that and helping her friends."

In keeping with her lifelong focus on education, Mrs. Resnick established the Resnick Teacher Scholarship Fund at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her son Mitchel is a professor of learning research focused on the use of technology in teaching elementary school students.

Mitchel Resnick, of Cambridge, Mass., credits his mother with providing the inspiration to devote his own career to education. He said the fund offsets travel and registration costs of elementary schoolteachers participating in conferences and workshops offered through the program.

"The fact that I ended up doing this was inspired by my mom," Mitchel Resnick said.

In addition to her three children and son-in-law, Mrs. Resnick is survived by two grandchildren.

Services will be held at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, April, 7, at Temple Beth El-Ner Tamid, 715 Paxon Hollow Rd., Broomall. Contributions can be made to the Resnick Teacher Scholarship Fund. For information on how to contribute, visit bit.ly/resnick-fund.