Yes, we actually had those types of desks from the 1930s in our classrooms. Inkwell and all. I can’t discuss my early years without mentioning a few of my teachers. In second grade I had Miss Edgar, the quintessential leftover Victorian Era schoolmarm. She was second in age only to God. Her doctor was an paleontologist. Very old and very wrinkled. Her hair was dyed jet black, she had on copious amounts of blue eyeshadow, her cheeks looked like the rosy cheeks of a clown doll, her lips were fire-engine red, and, I am not lying, she had a silver incisor. I think she put her makeup on with a cement trowel. She hated boys. I don’t know why, but she hated boys. Unfortunately for me, I happen to be a boy. She loved the girls. She treated them with all the deference her shriveled heart could muster. My cousin Kathy was two years older than me, and they had a mutual love. But my friend John and I got paddled every other day. I remember well a rainy day recess. We couldn’t go out to the playground, but Miss Edgar allowed us to go out on the front porch of the school. The front porch was maybe 12 feet by 30 feet. A wide set of about six steps led up to the neo-classical porch with large columns on either side. Of course we got rowdy and two kids starting playing keepaway with my baseball cap. One of them tossed it and it landed on the first step down from the porch. The first step. So my right foot went on the first step as I bent down and retrieved my cap. I would guess within 30 seconds Miss DeGeorge appeared, throwing open the outer doors of the school, grabbing me by the arm, and paddling me all the way down the 30 foot entrance hallway, turning left, and all the way down the final 30 feet to her room. And of course yelling, “I told you not to go off the porch” fifty or so times. Not too traumatizing for a seven-year-old.
In third grade it was Mrs. McClellan. I can see her face plain as day. Older, rather plain, with the shorter permanent hairdo popular in the early 60s. The only problem with her was that she was a germophobe. Back then we used handkerchiefs. Granted, I wouldn’t be too fond of it now, but that is what everyone did. You kept a handkerchief in your back pocket. Well she caught me using it. She grabbed me by the arm, marched me down to the boys room, threw open the door, went to a toilet stall and forced me to flush the handkerchief down the toilet. Well, that’s not too traumatizing for an eight-year-old.
At least my first, fourth, and fifth grade teachers were rather normal. Mrs. Kline, Mrs. Laurman, and Mrs. Bedogne. In sixth grade we had someone that I swear looked like Granny Clampett. She had gray hair and kept it in a tight bun like a pioneer woman and wore those little round-framed metallic glasses popular in the 1920s. Mrs. McDowell was only there for about the three months or so of sixth grade, but in that short time she managed to make my life miserable.
I have decided to leave out the details of the sixth grade episode because it would come off as mean-spirited. The meditation must be doing me some good. Mrs. McDowell left suddenly and without an explanation. (Nothing to do with me, by the way)
After that we got our first male teacher, whose name escapes me. I’m guessing he was in the first wave of men to figure out that going to school for teaching gave them a deferment from the draft, the late 1960s being the height of the slaughter of the Vietnam War. I don’t begrudge anyone the opportunity to have avoided being cannon fodder for an ill-advised war. But there was an entire generation of male teaches who could have cared less about teaching or kids and only saw it as an opportunity to stay out of the Army. He would take us down to the TV room once a week to watch the Mr. Alder’s Science show on WQED, the first public broadcast station in the U.S. We would go in, watch the achingly boring show, and return to our class. We got nothing out of it, and I found it to be worthless. One day I couldn’t take it anymore, so I wrote up a petition to the teacher demanding that we stop watching it. At lunch, I took it around to the entire class and they all signed it. I placed it on the teacher’s desk. When he returned to the classroom, he sat down, picked up the petition, read each word, and looked over the signatures while peering menacingly over the top of the paper. Then he stood up, slowly eyed the entire class, and demanded to know who signed the petition. My friends John and Larry and I were the only ones to put up our hands. This was an early lesson in what it takes to intimidate a crowd.
We were punished by remaining in the room while the rest of the class went to watch Mr. Boring’s science show, and we had to write some science paper thing, I don’t remember what. But in my eyes, I won. I didn’t have to watch Mr. Alder’s Science show, and the trauma began to subside!
Note: I have changed the names of any teacher of whom I speak ill.
End of Part III
We're All Mad Here 