Fourth Grade was going to be very challenging. The teacher I was to get had a reputation that made Mrs. Masters look like the nice lady from Romper Room. Her name was Mrs. English. She had soft white hair, steel blue eyes and a nose that looked like it had been pinched to almost complete closure. Her long thin nostrils protruded like two dark alleys from the bony crooked road that was her nose. Everyone knew she was THE MEANEST teacher. It did not help that she was also very tall giving us the feeling of someone with enormous power and a wide open view of every thing in the classroom. Shrinking down in your chair would not help.
She would slap a ruler on her desk when she needed to jerk all our heads up and directly at her. She new none of us would ever misbehave in her classroom because we were so afraid of her reputation finding out if there was any truth to it was one test none of us was willing to take. So we sat. We read. We added and subtracted. We looked at books and did art projects and we sang when we were told to sing. And just when I thought I had almost made it out of fourth grade unscathed, a ball flies out of left field and hits me square in the forehead.
On March 8, 1970 my father died in a car accident. I had to miss one week of school to sit shiva. Mrs. English had the class make condolence cards for me which were hand delivered by one of my class mates and her mother. I still have them. I am not sure if everything I learned in fourth grade was instantly erased from my mind while I sat shiva, but I do know Mrs. English was particularly nice to me when I returned to school. She use to smile at me. It was the first time a teacher ever smiled at me. It makes me sad to think it took my losing a parent to see some kindness come out of one of my teachers. But back then I took what I could get in order to get through 4th Grade.
No comments:
Post a Comment