Letter to my English teacher
Dear Mrs. C,
We visited your classroom today. Both of your classrooms, actually. There was the one that we knew and loved, which is now a third or fourth grade classroom, and then there was the one you use now, in a building that did not exist when we were your students thirty years ago.
Your presence is in both classrooms. In the first room, you were there in the memories we brought with us, while in the second your presence was palpable in how you had arranged the room, in the posters you had tacked to the walls, in that strangely relaxed cursive scrawl you had up on the chalkboard reminding students about some imminent task at hand.
Our fifteen year old tour guide did not know the current Lower School classroom had once been yours, ours. She does now.
“This isn’t right. Mrs. C’s desk was in the front of the classroom.”
“Right. Up by the blackboards, not back by the windows.”
(Like who in their right mind would EVER set up the classroom differently?)
“The Shakespeare poster was on this wall.”
“My desk was right… HERE!”
“Oh, and there’s the ledge where she set her V-8 juice to keep it cold!”
We were ebullient, enraptured, lost in time.
We were getting our tour guide way off schedule, but we didn’t care one eency, weency little bit.
Your classroom, the old classroom, the “real” classroom, was, as I am sure you well remember, a corner room on the top floor of the school. There were windows on two sides, which made the room seem larger and brighter. The windows overlooked the Lower Field. On any given afternoon you could look out to see children at recess or girls playing field hockey or lacrosse.
We all had you for 8th grade English, and some of us for 8th grade Reading as well. Maybe it was called Literature by that point in time. My children have a more amorphous course called Language Arts, where English and Reading/Literature are lumped all together. I’m not sure which approach is better from a pedagogical point, but with English and Literature separate we could have you twice in one day, as opposed to only once, and that in itself would merit the split.
We read A Tale of Two Cities in your classroom. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I was always going to make that the opening line for my roman a clef on West Point, only I would write: “It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.”
“We are going to study ‘poy’try’ now,” you announced one day to the class. I had no idea what poy’try was, but it sounded mysterious and alluring. And hard. Clearly, it was something you held near and dear to your heart, just by the way you said it. Poy’try was something far superior to Dickens or Hawthorne or even -- dare I say it? – Shakespeare, whom you so adored. “We are going to read some ‘poy’ms,’” you said. “And then you are going to write one of your own.” I didn’t know what a poy’m was. Maybe it was the Greek word for some exotic form of literature. We were always learning words like onomatopoeia and hyperbole and denouement. Poy’m was just one more to add to the list.
It was another ten minutes or so before I realized that you were talking about poetry. And that a “poy’m” was really a poem. Your Southern accent was strange and foreign to our provincial ears, and somehow, when you said it, “poetry” became a two and a half syllable word and “poem” only had one and a half syllables.
As the light went on in our heads, a feeling of dismay descended upon us. Oh, no. Not poetry!
Poetry was hard. It never made sense. It had confusing rhymes and rhythms and meters and all sorts of strange features we found alarming and disconcerting. We weren’t really going to read poems, were we?
Yes. Yes, we were.
You loved poetry. Especially the poems of Emily Dickinson. We did not much like poetry. But if you were teaching it, we would at least pay attention. And then learn to love it.
You taught us grammar and punctuation and marked up our papers with your trademark red pen. I have heard that you no longer use a red pen, because it might traumatize the students. Psshaw! It was character building. We would hold our breaths as you passed back papers and then, bracing ourselves, nonchalantly flip the papers over on our way out of the classroom to catch a peek at how much red there might be. To this day, I love grammar and punctuation. As an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, the attention to detail that grammar and punctuation require thrills me to the bone. My friends and family call me Conan the Grammarian, but whenever they have a question, they always come to me.
I have a hard time writing to you because I am always afraid I am going to make a grammatical error. Or spell something wrong. Or misuse a word. Or leave out a comma. Or, worse yet, put one in where it doesn’t belong. One time in eighth grade I was irritated with you because you marked something on one of my papers as a fragment. Well, of course, it was a fragment. I had done it on purpose. For effect. Didn’t you know I knew the difference between a fragment and a sentence? Afterall, wasn’t it you who had so carefully taught me the difference?
I worshipped the ground you walked on. Your perfume filled the classroom with a distinctive scent, even when you weren’t in it. You were everything I wanted to be but knew I never could be: beautiful, smart, funny, poised, kind, and wise. I find it somehow ironic that when you taught me English you were younger than I am now. How could you have been so wise, and I am still so dumb? You exuded a calm sense of wisdom. And a love for language and literature. You were demanding but enticing. You made us want to reach, to stretch, to do more than we thought we could do. I would have done anything for you. Even read poetry.
You encouraged us to be thoughtful, creative, to take risks. You ingrained the beauty of the English language within us. You made us strive to write the best that we could write.
Frequently, while in Senior School, I would make the long trip back across campus to the Middle School, and up to your corner classroom, where I would hang out and talk with you. Probably bothering you. I was intensely attracted to someone who had a love for language and literature and who understood my desire to write, to put words on paper, to make people laugh and cry or sigh with the flick of a pen. There was the beauty of the story or the poem, and then there was the beauty of the language itself. It was like a secret club, and I wanted to be part of it.
As we, returning alumni, wound our ways through the halls and buildings of a much expanded campus, we came upon a display case with “Teacher Sayings.” Mrs. H, our former Latin teacher, probably had the most accurate saying for our twenty-fifth high school reunion: “Tempus fugit!” But it was your saying that proved familiar and profound: “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
While on the surface, this bidding sounds simple and obvious and commonsensical, in reality it has proven very difficult for many of us on our journeys through life. It has taken me over forty years to be able to understand and accept Hamlet’s directive. I had to end an eighteen year marriage; acknowledge my sexuality; step away from the religion in which I was raised; change political party affiliations; go back to school; and begin a totally new career path in order to even begin to be the person I really am. Forget the road less traveled! I had been on a four lane freeway that everyone else seemed to think was the truth and the light and the way, when in reality, I needed to go off road and cut a swath through the vines and thorn bushes and underbrush that leave burrs all over my pants and in my hair.
As the mother of two children, as someone who wants to guide and nurture and set an example, I had to embrace the real, hard truth: If we cannot be who we are, then who can we be?
Mrs. C, we wanted to crowd into your “new” classroom in the new Middle School building and breathe in, soak in, revel in all that was you. But your door was locked. We had to peek in the darkened window and discern your trademark touches. We went into a neighboring classroom to find a pen and a piece of paper, which someone ripped out of some poor student’s notebook. (“Oh, they won’t mind. It’s for a good cause!”) We wrote you a message, a brief Kilroy type missive in two colors of ink as our first pen died midway through the first part of our greeting. “We love you!” we wrote in plain and simple English and signed our names, much as the forefathers must have signed the Declaration of Independence, if you can suspend disbelief and pretend they all signed it one after the other, passing the pen from signer to signer. We folded up the note, and one person wrote: “To Mrs. C. From your beloved students.” We immediately realized our mistake. Oops! While you may well hold affection for all of your students past and present, it is clearly you who is the beloved one. We amended the message with “Actually, it is we who belove you.” Very bad English indeed! But somehow, oh, so perfect.
With much love and eternal thanks,
One of your former students
We visited your classroom today. Both of your classrooms, actually. There was the one that we knew and loved, which is now a third or fourth grade classroom, and then there was the one you use now, in a building that did not exist when we were your students thirty years ago.
Your presence is in both classrooms. In the first room, you were there in the memories we brought with us, while in the second your presence was palpable in how you had arranged the room, in the posters you had tacked to the walls, in that strangely relaxed cursive scrawl you had up on the chalkboard reminding students about some imminent task at hand.
Our fifteen year old tour guide did not know the current Lower School classroom had once been yours, ours. She does now.
“This isn’t right. Mrs. C’s desk was in the front of the classroom.”
“Right. Up by the blackboards, not back by the windows.”
(Like who in their right mind would EVER set up the classroom differently?)
“The Shakespeare poster was on this wall.”
“My desk was right… HERE!”
“Oh, and there’s the ledge where she set her V-8 juice to keep it cold!”
We were ebullient, enraptured, lost in time.
We were getting our tour guide way off schedule, but we didn’t care one eency, weency little bit.
Your classroom, the old classroom, the “real” classroom, was, as I am sure you well remember, a corner room on the top floor of the school. There were windows on two sides, which made the room seem larger and brighter. The windows overlooked the Lower Field. On any given afternoon you could look out to see children at recess or girls playing field hockey or lacrosse.
We all had you for 8th grade English, and some of us for 8th grade Reading as well. Maybe it was called Literature by that point in time. My children have a more amorphous course called Language Arts, where English and Reading/Literature are lumped all together. I’m not sure which approach is better from a pedagogical point, but with English and Literature separate we could have you twice in one day, as opposed to only once, and that in itself would merit the split.
We read A Tale of Two Cities in your classroom. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I was always going to make that the opening line for my roman a clef on West Point, only I would write: “It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.”
“We are going to study ‘poy’try’ now,” you announced one day to the class. I had no idea what poy’try was, but it sounded mysterious and alluring. And hard. Clearly, it was something you held near and dear to your heart, just by the way you said it. Poy’try was something far superior to Dickens or Hawthorne or even -- dare I say it? – Shakespeare, whom you so adored. “We are going to read some ‘poy’ms,’” you said. “And then you are going to write one of your own.” I didn’t know what a poy’m was. Maybe it was the Greek word for some exotic form of literature. We were always learning words like onomatopoeia and hyperbole and denouement. Poy’m was just one more to add to the list.
It was another ten minutes or so before I realized that you were talking about poetry. And that a “poy’m” was really a poem. Your Southern accent was strange and foreign to our provincial ears, and somehow, when you said it, “poetry” became a two and a half syllable word and “poem” only had one and a half syllables.
As the light went on in our heads, a feeling of dismay descended upon us. Oh, no. Not poetry!
Poetry was hard. It never made sense. It had confusing rhymes and rhythms and meters and all sorts of strange features we found alarming and disconcerting. We weren’t really going to read poems, were we?
Yes. Yes, we were.
You loved poetry. Especially the poems of Emily Dickinson. We did not much like poetry. But if you were teaching it, we would at least pay attention. And then learn to love it.
You taught us grammar and punctuation and marked up our papers with your trademark red pen. I have heard that you no longer use a red pen, because it might traumatize the students. Psshaw! It was character building. We would hold our breaths as you passed back papers and then, bracing ourselves, nonchalantly flip the papers over on our way out of the classroom to catch a peek at how much red there might be. To this day, I love grammar and punctuation. As an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, the attention to detail that grammar and punctuation require thrills me to the bone. My friends and family call me Conan the Grammarian, but whenever they have a question, they always come to me.
I have a hard time writing to you because I am always afraid I am going to make a grammatical error. Or spell something wrong. Or misuse a word. Or leave out a comma. Or, worse yet, put one in where it doesn’t belong. One time in eighth grade I was irritated with you because you marked something on one of my papers as a fragment. Well, of course, it was a fragment. I had done it on purpose. For effect. Didn’t you know I knew the difference between a fragment and a sentence? Afterall, wasn’t it you who had so carefully taught me the difference?
I worshipped the ground you walked on. Your perfume filled the classroom with a distinctive scent, even when you weren’t in it. You were everything I wanted to be but knew I never could be: beautiful, smart, funny, poised, kind, and wise. I find it somehow ironic that when you taught me English you were younger than I am now. How could you have been so wise, and I am still so dumb? You exuded a calm sense of wisdom. And a love for language and literature. You were demanding but enticing. You made us want to reach, to stretch, to do more than we thought we could do. I would have done anything for you. Even read poetry.
You encouraged us to be thoughtful, creative, to take risks. You ingrained the beauty of the English language within us. You made us strive to write the best that we could write.
Frequently, while in Senior School, I would make the long trip back across campus to the Middle School, and up to your corner classroom, where I would hang out and talk with you. Probably bothering you. I was intensely attracted to someone who had a love for language and literature and who understood my desire to write, to put words on paper, to make people laugh and cry or sigh with the flick of a pen. There was the beauty of the story or the poem, and then there was the beauty of the language itself. It was like a secret club, and I wanted to be part of it.
As we, returning alumni, wound our ways through the halls and buildings of a much expanded campus, we came upon a display case with “Teacher Sayings.” Mrs. H, our former Latin teacher, probably had the most accurate saying for our twenty-fifth high school reunion: “Tempus fugit!” But it was your saying that proved familiar and profound: “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
While on the surface, this bidding sounds simple and obvious and commonsensical, in reality it has proven very difficult for many of us on our journeys through life. It has taken me over forty years to be able to understand and accept Hamlet’s directive. I had to end an eighteen year marriage; acknowledge my sexuality; step away from the religion in which I was raised; change political party affiliations; go back to school; and begin a totally new career path in order to even begin to be the person I really am. Forget the road less traveled! I had been on a four lane freeway that everyone else seemed to think was the truth and the light and the way, when in reality, I needed to go off road and cut a swath through the vines and thorn bushes and underbrush that leave burrs all over my pants and in my hair.
As the mother of two children, as someone who wants to guide and nurture and set an example, I had to embrace the real, hard truth: If we cannot be who we are, then who can we be?
Mrs. C, we wanted to crowd into your “new” classroom in the new Middle School building and breathe in, soak in, revel in all that was you. But your door was locked. We had to peek in the darkened window and discern your trademark touches. We went into a neighboring classroom to find a pen and a piece of paper, which someone ripped out of some poor student’s notebook. (“Oh, they won’t mind. It’s for a good cause!”) We wrote you a message, a brief Kilroy type missive in two colors of ink as our first pen died midway through the first part of our greeting. “We love you!” we wrote in plain and simple English and signed our names, much as the forefathers must have signed the Declaration of Independence, if you can suspend disbelief and pretend they all signed it one after the other, passing the pen from signer to signer. We folded up the note, and one person wrote: “To Mrs. C. From your beloved students.” We immediately realized our mistake. Oops! While you may well hold affection for all of your students past and present, it is clearly you who is the beloved one. We amended the message with “Actually, it is we who belove you.” Very bad English indeed! But somehow, oh, so perfect.
With much love and eternal thanks,
One of your former students
posted by delta at 11:37 AM
1 Comments:
You should email her this. Or print it and mail it. It's beautiful and made me teary-eyed. Thank god she didn't die or I'd have been sobbing, head on the ref desk : )
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