Teachers

TEACHERS

WHEN THE BELL RANG at the end of recess time on the playground at Mt. Pleasant Elementary School, all the children froze, as they had been instructed to do--to not move--until the teacher on duty blew her whistle. The teacher would look around the playground, searching for violators of the rule--that is, any of the kids who might be moving--and if she found any, they would be in BIG trouble: turned in to the principal's office for punishment. Finally, after what seemed like forever, the teacher would blow the whistle, and we could all then file back into the classrooms.

My second grade teacher, Miss Blanding, said that when you snap your fingers, the noise you hear is your fingers breaking the sound barrier.

Mr. Black, my 6th grade teacher, said that there is an eclipse of the moon every month, but that it takes the entire month for it to complete its cycle.

Mrs. Preston, in the third grade, said that the reason they say "God bless you" (or "Gesundheit") after you sneeze is because that little spasm of a sneeze actually stops your heart for a split second, and then it has to start up all over again; so that the "God bless you" is really a little prayer that helps you to keep on living.

Every day before school--just before the tardy bell rang--we would line up outside our respective classrooms and wait for the teacher to let us in. We would form two lines: one for the boys and one for the girls.

Back in 1957, Miss Barker, my fourth grade teacher at Mt. Pleasant Elementary School, told the class that USSR stood for the United States of Soviet Russia.

Miss Fitzpatrick, my first grade teacher, divided the class into three reading groups--Group A, B, and C--according to our reading ability, which included both our reading speed and our comprehension skills.

Every year that I was in elementary School, at ten o'clock in the morning on the last Friday of each month, the air raid sirens came on. The teachers would tell us to get under our desks. It was just a test--a practice, they said--but still we were told to crawl under our desks, place our hands over the backs of our necks, and face AWAY from the windows so that we would not be injured by the broken glass in the event of a nuclear attack.
My high school psychology teacher told us that pornography leads to masturbation, which leads to homosexuality, which leads to necrophilia.

My philosopher professor in college said that humans are not animals, but children of God. When pressed, he admitted that humans are, indeed, mammals, but that we are children of God, not animals. We are children of God, he repeated one more time, for emphasis, in case any of us missed the point, or in case any of us ever dared to challenge him again.

At the age of 5, when I told my mom that it seemed to me that the week went by very quickly, she said that as you grow older, time does pass more quickly.

One day, back in the 3rd grade, we had a substitute teacher, and someone in the class asked her where babies came from. She seemed a little uneasy with the question, but finally managed a response: she said that when the mother and father decide that they want to have a baby, they kneel down at night and pray to God. They pray and they pray, and if they pray hard enough and are good enough, God will send them a baby and put it in the mother's tummy.

Mr. Black, in the 6th grade, told us that the scientists at NASA were planning to launch a rocket to the moon that would carry an atomic bomb; they would launch the rocket a few days before the new moon, and then explode the bomb on the moon's dark surface so that we could see it from the earth--so we could see man's awesome power.

Every teacher I ever had, all through elementary, junior high, and high school, told their classes that the people living during the time of Christopher Columbus all believed that the world was flat.

In my Sunday School class, the teacher said that God put all the fossils of dinosaurs on the earth in order to test the faith of the true believers and to make fools of those who do not believe.

My U.S. History teachers in both the eighth and eleventh grades told us about Manifest Destiny, when the United States was settling the plains and the West. They told us of the big round-ups and the cattle drives, and the branding, and how it didn't even hurt the cattle when they burned their flesh because their hides were so thick and tough.

During show-and-tell time in my fourth grade class with Miss Barker, every day almost Diane Smooth would get up, stand at the front of the room, and tell about the dreams she had had the night before. Most of us, at show-and-tell time, would bring something from home to show the class and then talk about that. But Diane told us about her dreams, her wonderful dreams--dreams in which every detail was included, dreams in which she did the most amazing things: go to the circus, ride the elephants, fly in airplanes (or sometimes on magic carpets), travel to strange lands: to the mountains of Tibet or South America, to the exotic islands in the South Pacific, even to the North Pole once; she would ride horses and camels, drive expensive cars, eat in fancy restaurants, play the piano (or sometimes the violin) in concert halls around the world, excel in athletic events. But what was especially mesmerizing was that she would include all of us in the class in her dreams. We actually got to travel with her on all her marvelous adventures, to all her fabulous places. We would sit there on the edge of our seats in the classroom and listen to her tell us the stories about all the miraculous things we could do.

My sixth grade teacher, Mr. Black, said that when you snap your fingers, the sound you hear is not the breaking of the sound barrier; the sound barrier is much louder than that. Miss Blanding was wrong, he said. But, he continued, that little pop you hear when you crack a bull whip. . . .

In junior high school, this one guy who rode the bus every day and who knew everything there was about the world said that babies came out of a woman's butt, and not their vagina, because a vagina is much too small.

Mr. Sanchez, my Spanish teacher my sophomore year in high school, herded us all into the classroom and then very solemnly told us that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Every Wednesday in elementary school, the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders had this thing called Release Time. We would march in double columns off the school grounds and across the street to the community center, and there we would receive religious instruction for an hour from a Sister Reisner. One day Julie Pope, who sat next to me back in the classroom at the school, raised her hand and said that Jesse Christensen, who was sitting right behind me as she spoke, had used the Lord's name in vain out on the playground during recess. Sister Reisner asked Jesse if this were true. With his head down, he said in a mild voice, "Yes." Sister Reisner then asked Jesse to take a few moments to pray to the Lord and ask forgiveness for his sin. When he was through, she continued with the lesson.

Miss Blanding, in the second grade, told us all one day during our science lesson that the daddy-long-legs spider had the most deadly poison in the whole world--more toxic than black widows, than rattlesnakes, than cobras, more deadly even than tarantulas, she said. But we were lucky, she added, because daddy-long legs have no fangs with which to bite and inject their poison.

In the 5th grade and again in the 8th and 11th grades, when we studied American history, we had a unit on the Indians. Each time we studied them, we learned how they had helped the settlers in so many different ways: perhaps the most important was how they taught the new Americans to lay a fish down in the earth with the kernels of corn to help them grow into good, strong ears. And at Thanksgiving time, the pilgrims would return the favor and invite the Indians to come on over and eat turkey with them.

Doug Newlan, who was taller than any of us on the school yard and who knew everything there was to know and who taught a lot of us about sex and who later played basketball in the NBA for the Golden State Warriors, asked me once in between innings of a little league baseball game if I knew what a whore was. I said that I didn't; and he said, "Don't ask your mother, or she'll kick you out of the house." Later, secretly looking it up in the dictionary, I searched and searched in vain, trying nearly every spelling variation I could imagine: hore, hoar, hor, hoare, hoer, etc. It was almost a year before I found it.

Mr. Heaton, my biology teacher in the 11th grade, said that when you pith a frog, the frog feels nothing because you have scrambled its brains and destroyed its spinal cord, and once you've done that, the frog feels nothing, even though its heart is still beating and its lungs are still breathing in and out, and even though its body had jerked and tightened and then went limp when the needle was first inserted.

My twelfth grade English teacher, Mr. Parsons, said that when a person dies, there is a measurable loss of body weight, and what that body weight loss is, he said, is the departure of the soul up to heaven.

Once, when I was very young and my family was on vacation and we were eating breakfast in a restaurant, I asked my dad why it was that men always seemed to marry women. All of my best friends were boys, I said, and I asked him if men ever married other men. He said, "Not usually."

Our Boy Scout leader, Todd Lyon, taught us the catch-and-release method; he called it the catch-and-release fishing philosophy: you catch the fish, but then, after you've taken the hook out, you release the fish back into the water, so that someone else can catch them and let them go again. He said that this is a good thing because you don't kill the fish. He also said that the fish don't feel a thing when the hook goes through their mouth, or into their jaw or their gills. It doesn't hurt the fish one bit, he said, because fish live in the water and their nerve endings are different from humans'.

Years later, I ran into my former Sunday School teacher, Sister Love, who, when she saw me, got all excited about how much I had grown and what a fine, young man I had turned out to be. After her initial enthusiasm receded to a more normal level, she asked me what was the most important thing I had learned in her Sunday School class. (To be perfectly honest, I could not even remember that she had ever been my Sunday school teacher, let alone what I had learned in her class.) So I hemmed and hawed for awhile and tried to change the subject; but she persisted. She said that when she ran into her other former students, she would ask them what they remembered most from her class, and, she said, without exception, they all told her the same thing. She paused for a moment, waiting for me to fill in the blank. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember a thing--though, of course, I couldn't tell her this. Finally, she sensed I was being coy with her, and she told me: "Honesty," she said; "be honest and true. It's the best policy," she said, looking me squarely in my round eye.

During show-and-tell one time, K. C. Wise brought a penny to class that she said she had put on a railroad track. It was so flat and squished that, when she passed the coin around for the class to see, we could barely make out the face of Abraham Lincoln. After she was through sharing and after the entire class had looked at the penny, Miss Barker, our 4th grade teacher, told us that we should never, never, never put coins on train tracks. Once, she told us, an entire train that had been derailed by a penny placed on the tracks by a thoughtless child.

Timmy Smith, who was a little older than the rest of us kids and who lived down the street from us on Montecito Drive and who also knew everything there was about the world (he told me where babies came from), took us all underneath the new houses that were being built in our neighborhood that summer and led us to the cement foundations of the fireplaces under the houses, and there in front of us all he wrote the dirtiest, most foul, vulgar word he could think of: jack-ass.

I hadn't committed myself very well while I was in high school; my grades were too poor to get into the University, so I enrolled in the local community college. But the college was growing, and its enrollment was climbing, and when I was a sophomore, the college added its first four-year baccalaureate degree. The state legislature then approved a change in the school's name from Mt. Pleasant Community College to Mt. Pleasant State College.

One day Sister Reisner was teaching us all about salvation. She said that when you accept Jesus as your savior, you were saved, and you would then bask in the full glory of God. She said that she had been saved because she had made a personal commitment to Christ. She asked if any of us had made our personal commitment to Christ. The room went quiet for a moment, but then Julie Pope raised her hand and said that she had been saved. Another girl, Susan Automobile, said that she had been saved too (although this surprised me because two weeks earlier, out by the bicycle racks, Susan and I had kissed three times). Billy Kramer said that he had made his personal commitment to Jesus too.

The school colors at Mt. Pleasant High School were navy blue and royal blue. At graduation time, the caps and gowns came in these two colors; the boys wore the navy blue, and the girls wore the royal blue.

Mr. Black, in the 6th grade, said that it's not true at all that when you sneeze, your heart stops for a moment, and that the "Gesundheit" restores you to life. He said that Mrs. Preston was wrong. But he did say that when you sneeze, there is such a tremendous, sudden pressure in your head that there is the risk--a slight one, granted, but a risk nonetheless--that your eyes will pop out of their sockets; so it's still a good thing to utter that prayer, just in case.

My friend Alex C. said that when he was in the parochial school in Brooklyn and when the air raid sirens came on at ten o'clock in the morning on the last Friday of each month, the nuns instructed all the children to lay their heads down on their desks on top of their folded arms and to just try to go to sleep.