Teachers and Me (The Elementary Years)

My Second Grade Class. See the board with the eight figures in a circle? One of them was mine.

It was about members of the community and I drew a nurse.

Notice I'm right in front of the teacher's desk in the center? I look pretty cocky in my Brownies uniform!

I'm one of the few people I know that really enjoyed going to school. To me it was one long social experiment in Teacher/Student Relations. I really loved elementary school. We lived in a small community outside of a small town in North Carolina. We had two country stores, a volunteer fire department and an elementary school. The stores, and school were the sites of all community happenings. The firehouse could be rented for parties (my awesome 9th birthday party, in third grade, was held there - people talked about it for years) and they held an annual barbecue there. The Halloween carnival at the school every year was THE EVENT of the year. The school baseball field was also where the community Little League team practiced and played home games. And my Dad was the coach.

In first grade I shared being teacher's pet with my friend Cathy. I really hated writing and Cathy did most of my writing for me. It's not that I didn't understand words or letters - I was one of the best readers in the class - I just hated the actual physical part of writing. I'm sure the teacher must have known what was going on, but she never said a word. In second grade I was a MAJOR teacher's pet. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Lane actually gave me a gold bracelet (although I doubt it's real gold) when I finished sixth grade. I still have it. I believe my third grade teacher, knowing I had been teacher's pet for two years (it was a very small school), decided to teach me the harsh realities of life and consequently treated me like crap. It was shocking and disturbing after being so pampered by my first two teachers. I acted out a bit and used to spend lots of time making fun of her. In my innocent youth, making fun of her went like this: "I bet Mrs. Parker is George Washington's grandmother!"

My fourth grade teacher was a true anomaly: She treated EVERYONE exactly the same. I think I only ever had one other teacher like that. But that was not until my senior year in high school. And while she treated everyone with absolutely no interest whatsoever, the high school teacher treated everyone as if they were ALL the teacher's pet. He was an awesome teacher. He had even had a day named for him by the city of Fort Worth a year or two before I moved here. My fourth grade teacher was morbidly obese and I used to get distracted thinking, "Her ankle is bigger than my thigh." I wonder if she ever noticed me constantly looking back and forth between her ankles and my thighs? I saw her at my dance recital that Christmas and she acted like she didn't even know me. I walked right up to her and asked why she was there. She pointed to her daughter, who went to another school and was MY AGE! I don't know why that freaked me out. I guess because most teachers that had kids lived in the neighborhood and we knew who they were.

My fifth grade teacher gave me the crook-eye on the first day of school. She was the first teacher I encountered that had had my brother as a student. Although this didn't happen often, as we moved and there was a four year difference, I found it to be a mixed blessing. This was 1971 and the year they started busing. It was the topic of conversation all summer that they were going to bus in all these black kids from Fremont. There had only been three black kids in my class before this: Jody and Phillip, boy and girl twins that were the children of a wealthy black dentist, and Peggy, a very poor, very quiet girl. (Mrs. Lane, the teacher in the picture was always sneaking her bags of clothes and things.) Suddenly there were all these black kids that didn't want to be there. My fifth grade teacher was also black and I don't know if that helped or not, but there was a lot of tension. I talked to my Dad about it and he told me to figure out who the leader was and make friends with her. I can spot the alpha person easily and knew it was Belinda. I took his advice to heart and started making small talk with her whenever I could. The true breakthrough came the day of the talent show. When I pulled out my ballet costume in the bathroom, the Fremont girls went crazy. They loved the bright colors, the sequins and just the very glamour of the thing. I asked Belinda to help me get dressed. And that was the end of the racial tension. RIGHT THERE. I don't know what sort of student my brother had been for Mrs. Smith, but she always liked me after that.

Sixth grade was all sorts of weird. The brother thing? Well, this teacher, Mrs. Howell, had LOVED my brother. And my brother is a truly gifted artist. For some reason Mrs. Howell must have thought artistic talent was evenly spread amongst families because she put me in charge of two bulletin boards in the room and one in the school's hall. The long board at the back of the room was always a Grandma Moses picture, like the one above, that we would distort to fit a long bulletin board. We were allowed to work on these boards DURING class. Fortunately I was allowed to pick a team. I wasn't stupid. Most people would have picked their friends. Not me. I picked the three best artists. I didn't want Mrs. Howell to know I didn't really have any artistic talent. Since I was in charge, I would tell everyone what they were going to work on. In this picture, for instance, I would have assigned myself the stream, bridge, and cabin in the upper right. I usually had Marty and Bruce draw the people and Donnell would have done the rest. My friend Cathy, the same one from first grade (she had moved away after first grade and just moved back) was furious that I didn't pick her to help. I wish I had pictures of those Grandma Moses boards. The small board in the room was the holiday board and I did that myself. I don't really remember what the one in the school hallway was about because we only did it twice. Probably something peppy for visitors coming into the school. Mrs. Howell was always happy with "my" work. She was such an elegant classy lady. I can still see her sitting up on her stool. A true Southern Belle.

Sixth grade was also the year when select students got to spend spring days in the library helping the librarian inventory the books. It was practically a rite of passage to be selected to sort and catalogue books in the spring. Well what happened was, they started a special program called "Special Achievers" that year. Every morning at 10:30, I had to leave my regular class and go to another room for an hour where I was joined by another sixth grader, two fifth graders, three fourth graders and a third grader. We did special field trips, learned how to write a research paper, took apart a lawnmower and other weird things. I kind of enjoyed the SA class, until spring. Well the library thing and the SA class were at the same time. I raised hell. I had to go into the principal's office. They finally made a concession that I could skip SA and work in the library once a week. The principal tried to explain how special the Special Achiever's program was. Then he said, "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but you scored higher on the standardized tests than anyone in the history of this school." He was right. He shouldn't have told me.