on National Teacher’s Day

After eight hours of lying in my bed waking periodically so that my night’s sleep only amounted to four or five hours between long stretches of mulling over the future of the Duluth Schools I woke to find that it was National Teacher’s Day. I also found that Snoopy was done with his May dances having danced up a storm two days in a row. By May 3rd he was done with it.

Well, I’ll pick up where the Snoopster left off on May 3rd. with a rumination about a special teacher.

I moved from Kansas to Minnesota at the beginning of seventh grade and learned to my shock that I sounded like a southerner to the kids in North Mankato Junior High. They called me “Reb.” I was invited to my first fight within weeks of my arrival. I almost immediately was exposed as being near sighted and had to wear cardboard sunglasses to school and endure other indignities for the next three years. It was life out of a Beverly Cleary book.

I doubt that after she retired Mrs. Jones, my English teacher, would have had much of a recollection of me but I’ve never forgotten her. She was the teacher who on November 22nd, after an uncharacteristically lengthy absence from class, returned to tell us solemnly that President Kennedy had been shot. She made us learn the spelling of unexpected words like Albuquerque and “Rottweiler.” I remember her telling us of a girl tormented by a boy, who had asked Mrs. Jones for advice. Mrs. Jones advice was very funny. The next time the boy tormented the girl his victim told him in a serious and as complimentary a tone as she could muster, “You know Billy, you are very cadaverous.” Thinking he had been paid the highest compliment without having the slightest idea what the word meant the tormentor became more of a source of amusement to his victim than a menace.

Mrs. Jones was fascinated by the events of the world and made us read her classroom copies of the Reader’s Digest. I can’t forget reading about the Stanleyville Massacre and the vision of European’s stranded in the Congo surrounded by crowds of Congolese who cut out their livers and passed them around to eat before their dying eyes. For generations Africans had shared the livers of lions in much the same way to take on their power. Now they were taking on the powers of their hated colonizers. I remember reading the novella The Snow Goose , a story of another outsider, a hunchback, who bravely rescues doomed men at the battle of Dunkirk. And I remember reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I don’t read much fiction but I read this book carefully and was prepared when Mrs. Jones gave us a thirty question test on the story.

A day later Mrs. Jones announced to the class, with great satisfaction, that two students had gotten perfect papers on the test and asked the kids to guess who the smart kids were. All the popular or smart kids were guessed but all the guesses were wrong. Mrs. Jones announced that Jim Koeppen and Harry Welty had gotten perfect papers. Funny, I’m getting tears in my eyes thinking about my old teacher’s humanity. I was a kid who needed to be something other than a dorky newcomer with a funny accent and for the rest of that class I was I was a smart kid.

Its funny how such small tokens of generosity can stay with a person for a lifetime. Thank you Mrs. Jones wherever your spirit rests.

About the author