Tantalo, Joyce (Bartlett) age 69 formerly of Rochester, passed away on January 6, 2016 in Staten Island, New York where she has resided since 2002. Joyce is survived by her daughter Joelle Tantalo Jensen (James Bligh) and son Daniel J. Tantalo (Jamie); grandchildren Olivia and Miles. Joyce also leaves behind her loving dog, Dante. Joyce was a loving mother, a devoted English teacher, and friend. She grew up and spent most of her life in Rochester, Irondequoit and Gates, NY. She worked many years at Xerox in Webster, then EDS. Later, she obtained her Bachelor's degree in English and her Master's in Education at the City University of New York State, College at Staten Island and was employed by the New York City Board of Education. Joyce a.k.a. "Miss Tantalo" was a beloved English teacher at Port Richmond High School. Joyce was an avid sports fan, and the epitome of a football, soccer, & cheerleading mom. Throughout her life, was proud to a Buffalo Bills fan. Joyce lived her life vivaciously and will be dearly missed and always be remembered by those whose lives she touched. Friends and Family may come to celebrate her life and share memories of Joyce at 11:00 AM on Saturday, May 21, 2016 at Bartolomeo & Perotto Funeral Home 1411 Vintage Lane, Rochester NY 14626. Interment at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery. In Lieu of Flowers, the family asks that a donation be made to Aquinas Institute 1127 Dewey Avenue, Rochester NY 14613, or www.aquinasinstitute.com in Joyce's honor, as a mother of graduates of the classes of 1985 (Joelle) and 1986 (Daniel). Joyce was born on September 28, 1946 to Albert & Jean Bartlett. She graduated from West Irondequoit high school in 1964. Joyce then attended Nazareth College, RIT and MCC taking various classes in general studies and computers from 1980-1990. Later, Joyce attended SUNY Brockport and CUNY Staten Island for her Degree in Education and English. She received her Master's in Education from CUNY Staten Island. When Joyce was little, she and her parents Jean and Albert lived in an apartment building owned by her maternal grandparents who also lived there and operated a gas station. During these early years while her mom, Jean worked in the family business. Joyce would spend time with her maternal grandmother listening to radio shows and enjoying her grandma's favorite, ginger ale. Her dad, nicknamed her "mouse" because she was so shy and quiet. When Joyce was a little girl, about 9 years old, she suffered a severe broken leg when she was helping her Dad work on a roof and he fell off of a ladder. Joyce was forced to spend the entire summertime in bed with a cast up to her hip. During this time, Joyce developed a love of reading that she would pursue for a life time and instilled this love in her children. She read biographies of famous and important women in history, stories about actresses and presidents. Joyce also had a particular fondness for science fiction stories about space and time travel with alternate dimensions and/or with a supernatural theme. About this time, she dreamed of being a reclusive author living in exotic locales like Ernest Hemingway. Joyce was a tomboy. She enjoyed spending time in the outdoors and spent time fishing with her father Albert in the lakes surrounding the area. In the wintertime she enjoyed ice fishing with her Dad. While Joyce went on many camping and hunting trips with her Dad, she didn't hunt. Rather, she enjoyed staying back at the camp to read her beloved books and help make hearty stews and homemade bread when her dad returned. When Joyce was around 10 her little brother Joe was born. Joyce enjoyed playing with her baby brother and helping her mother with the household chores. She also spent a lot of time with her favorite cousin Sharon. During the late 1950's and early 1960's, Joyce was an accomplished piano player and earned extra money teaching Irondequoit neighborhood children piano lessons. She had a best friend in high school, Raina who loved to talk, to escape from homework and chores. Joyce also had a very special friendship with her cousins on her mom's side. She enjoyed her childhood and teenage years with her cousins Sharon, Gail and Debbie who helped Joyce mature from a tomboy to a young lady by dressing her up, doing her hair and makeup. Sharon, in particular was always Joyce's confidant and encouraged Joyce to enjoy life and brought her to popular block parties and dance halls. At one such party, Joyce was introduced to Dan Tantalo who she would ultimately marry and have his two children, Joelle and Daniel. They would move to Gates, New York where she lived until 1993 when she moved back to West Irondequoit. During the tumultuous 1960's and 1970's Joyce was socially conscious but outwardly conservative. She was deeply affected by the Kennedy Assassinations and would recount where she was when JFK was shot. She would tell her children how literally stunned she was for hours and that this moment was a watershed point in her life where she witnessed evil and experienced deep grief and sadness. Later, in 1968 when she was very pregnant with her second child, Daniel, she would again experience disappointment and despair when Martin Luther King was assassinated then shortly thereafter, Robert Kennedy was also killed. Joyce was also very conflicted about the Vietnam War, on the one hand, she was sympathetic to her classmates and relatives who were serving their country overseas, but on the other hand, she questioned our government as to why there was a necessity to have a war in the first place. Joyce remained interested in politics and social justice and enjoyed many lively debates with family, friends and students throughout her life. During the mid to late 1970's Joyce had a very lively social life and enjoyed disco dancing and listening to live music. She had many fun times at family events with cousin Sharon and her husband Pat and Cousin Gail for holidays and children's birthdays, communion parties, and confirmations. Music was a big part of her home life as well. She always had interesting albums and 8-track tapes, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Diamond, Barbara Streisand, Cher, Wings, Stevie Wonder, the Eagles. Joyce also joined the Black Friars Thespian Club. She was the Nightingale in the Greek play of the same name. It was performed at the planetarium and was quite a spectacle. Joyce always had a piano or electric keyboard in the house and encouraged her children to learn and enjoy playing music. She allowed both Joelle and Daniel to choose musical instruments and experiment, piano, flute, drums, clarinet, piccolo, trumpet. It was all good. She felt that by teaching her children to learn music and practice, practice, practice they would learn to overcome obstacles and difficult times and gain confidence by overcoming them. When her children were young, as a single parent Joyce kept her kids busy with sports and music. She spent many cold and wet days watching Danny play football for the Greece Chargers, and Joelle Cheerleading. She also drove them to baseball and soccer practice throughout the spring and summer. Joyce was always working to help to pay for music lessons at Eastman School of Music where Danny and Joelle attended from 7th grade - 12th grade, 3 times a week. There was also marching band practices, high school plays, and boxing that her children participated in when they attended Aquinas Institute. As to her career, in the late 1970's, early 1980's Joyce worked as a real estate broker listing and selling real estate in the city and suburbs of Rochester. In the early 1980's Joyce decided to embark on a major career change by working for Xerox, at the data center in Webster, NY. This job involved working shift work that changed every three months. At first, she worked in the OP which was basically a copy and binding job. Later she worked in the tape library where she would have to pull data that were kept on large cassettes and place them in the main frame computer, then refile them when they were done. She always strived to move up in the company, she often took training classes offered by the company and moved into an area where she would monitor large programs operating on Xerox mainframe systems and when an error would occur, 24/7, she would have to call the programmer (often times late at night) to fix the code and/or run a patch. Joyce would come home to tell her children about all of the new technology. When color printers were first created, Joyce printed out beautiful colorful campaign buttons when her daughter Joelle ran for class president. Also during this time, Joyce learned how to use a Xerox proprietary program called "Star" where she learned how to create documents, diagrams and layouts. She also worked on the Building 300 Xerox newsletter that she crafted on the "Star" program the newsletter was called "Bits & Bytes." Years later this Star program appeared to be the forerunner of what we all know as Windows Operating System. Her interest in technology during this very progressive time in computers inspired her children to always want to stay current and learn new things. Today, Joyce's son Daniel has made a very successful career in computer technology and manages teams of workers at Pepsi Co. to create, implement and run massive programs and migrate to new higher level technology platforms. Joyce had a really good run at Xerox and made many friends which last to date. Working crazy hours, and holidays had a way of bonding people forever. She was a recipient of Xerox Circle of Excellence Award and Xerox sent her and the other recipients to Bermuda. She also participated in the annual Xerox Building 300 Halloween Party often wearing funny and elaborate costumes. Joyce was a mouse no more. Her friends remember her as always laughing and chatting, she loved good gossip in the middle of the night to noon shift and laughed when her colleagues called her the Rona Barret of the Building 300. As all good things come to an end, Xerox eventually spun off its data center to another company EDS. Joyce began working for EDS but the management and culture was so different than the progressive XEROX she recognized that she would either have to upgrade her education or consider a career change. Around this time, she amped up her studies at local colleges, gathering credits toward an English Major. She took classes at Nazareth College, RIT, and Brockport. It was at his was a point when Joyce decided to become an educator. Her children were now out of college. It was her time to finally get her degree. Joyce first went to SUNY Brockport in their education department where she completed 3 years toward her teaching degree. Thereafter, she decided to move to New York City to complete her studies at City University of New York, College at Staten Island. Joyce completed her Bachelor's degree with an English Major and Education minor. In 2006 she received her Master's Degree in Education. Joyce was then hired by Port Richmond High School in Staten Island as an English teacher and Special Education teacher. Joyce chose Port Richmond because it was filled with children of immigrants and at risk youth. Joyce loved being a teacher, even though there was a major culture shock from Rochester to Staten Island, she worked on pronunciation of the names of her students who came from all over the world such as Guyana, Kenya, lslands of the Caribbean, Pakistan, China, Korea, Mexico, Ecuador, Venezuela, Poland, Russia, and Indonesia. These kids had diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds and Joyce would have some very lively stories about them. She also recognized that many of her students came from poverty. Joyce would go to Costco and try to incorporate snacks in her lessons when she discovered many of her students didn't have enough money to eat lunch. She also convinced her daughter to get her law firm to donate essential school supplies like pens, pencils, notebooks and folders and to mentor the Mock Trial Team. Joyce started a girl's golf team at Port Richmond. She also helped her special education students enjoy Greek mythology and Shakespeare, and helped them write fictional plays based on the mythological characters. Joyce continued to work throughout the time she underwent cancer treatment and chemotherapy. After her initial surgery she returned to the class room and enjoyed teaching her Special Ed kids the classics of literature. Unfortunately, the side effects of the radiation treatment and chemo therapy caused Joyce to have health issues and she was not able to continue to work at Port Richmond. However, even though she was retired, she still maintained contact with her fellow teachers, and former students via Facebook, email and by supporting the sports teams and drama club. She would often run into students when frequenting local businesses in Staten Island. You would hear "Miss! Miss ! Miss Tantalo! Remember me?! I was in your class 2 years ago!!" She always enjoyed hearing stories of what her students accomplished after leaving her classroom and growing into adults with families of their own. Joyce was a devoted single mom of Joelle and Daniel. She was also a devoted pet owner, Simon, a 160- pound German Shepard, Opie a black lab, Murphy's Law a Golden Retriever and her beloved Dante a cockapoo who was at her hospital bedside the night before she passed. Joyce was also grandmother to Daniel's children with his wife Jaime, her lovely granddaughter Olivia and fearless grandson Miles. While her grandchildren lived far away, first in Massachusetts and now in Texas, Joyce surrounded herself and her apartment with their pictures, artwork and crafts. Joyce was a fan of Greek Mythology and Shakespeare and even though many of her English teacher colleagues thought it old fashioned to teach these classics, Joyce always placed at least 1 Greek tragedy and 1 Shakespeare classic on her syllabus. She astounded her vice principle one year when her class of special education students wrote and performed their own Greek tragedy based on mythological characters. Joyce loved gardening, flowers and experimental cooking, her pets, her children and talking on the phone to her friends. Joyce was a Buffalo Bills fan and a member of the NYC Chapter of the Bills Backers Club. This is not an easy thing to be when teaching high school students who were predominantly Jets Fans and Giants Fans, but she would stand strong to support her team. And was always certain that they would win a Super Bowl one day.