Sunday, June 17 : The A.D.D. Detective
IT WASN’T DICK AND JANE
by Leigh Lundin
I have been thinking about Melodie Johnson Howe’s comment about people who dismiss certain genres and an observation James Lincoln Warren made about certain teachers. I realized I had a chequered past (pasts can be checked or chequered, but never checkered) regarding school and literature.
3rd Grade: My teacher called my parents in for a conference and handed them the book she had confiscated from me. “It has naked women in it,” she said, indignantly.
“It has opera in it,” said my father calmly.
“We refer to them as nudes,” said my mother.
“But… but… It may be a book about opera, but it’s OBSCENE. Where did your son get such a book?”
“We gave it to him.”
4th Grade: The teacher had required us to stand, one by one, and read aloud something sad and tragic, perhaps Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. As classmates read, in my distant corner of the room, I began giggling and then chuckling. The teacher frowned and the reading continued. I began laughing. The student stopped, the teacher glowered but signaled for reading to continue. Soon, I was laughing uncontrollably, tears rolling down my cheeks.
Since I was out of reach, the teacher slapped her desk with the ruler. “MR. LUNDIN. What is going on?”
I had already read most of the reader and found myself in a section reading a Mark Twain story about a fat man bending over at the bottom of a hill and a goat racing down the hill toward him, Twain at his funniest.
The teacher was not amused. I was indignant she when she barred me from reading ahead during class.
5th Grade: Mr. Whitman severely punished me when he caught me with Poe inside my textbook. He accused me of lying when I explained I had already read every story in the reader in the first few weeks. When I suggested he quiz me on any story he wished, he accused me of being a smartass (with some degree of validity) and violating school policy by reading ahead. He loved whipping students, and I had given him reason enough.
6th Grade: Mr. Hardin ripped one of my Aunt Rachel’s H.P.Lovecraft books in half (down the spine) and tossed it in the trash. He was lucky my aunt didn’t rip him in half (down the spine).
7th Grade: In middle school, I made the mistake of mentioning the textbook inadvertently omitted Gulliver putting out a fire. Called in again, my parents pointed out that while the method might have been obscene, it really was in Swift’s original story.
11th Grade: Matters didn’t improve much when I entered high school. We were barely into “Romeo and Juliet” when I stopped reading, aghast that Sampson’s and Gregory’s opening speech had been truncated to omit puns about maidenheads and the heads of maidens.
Fortunately, our new and very young teacher thought I was charming and cute, so the trouble I got into was a bit different from the past.
* * *
Thinking back, it must have begun in the first grade.
1st Grade: It wasn’t exactly great literature but… Miss Ruth, a fixture even when my mother was in school, taught a lesson about rumors and how stories change as people gossip with a game called “Telephone”. She sat us alphabetically (teachers always line up kids alphabetically) in a row and explained that she would whisper a short story to Amber who would whisper it to the child next to her, and so on down the line until it reached Walter, who would then tell the class the story as he heard it. After that, Miss Ruth would tell us the original anecdote and we could see how the retelling had changed the details.
Even in the first grade, there was something of an investigator or junior scientist in me (adults usually called it other names). Alphabetically, I was dead center in the row of little whisperers. When it was my turn and the story about a cuddly bunny’s bicycle reached my ear, I suddenly realized I could run a double experiment. I whispered to the girl next to me my own fabrication about a duckie who went ice skating. Then I panicked. What if the teacher worked backwards to find the culprit? Could she use corporal punishment? Or capital punishment? Would I be sent home, told never to darken school doors again?
When the story reached the end of the line and Walter told the story he heard out loud, Miss Ruth stood there in silence. Without a word, she sighed, packed it in, and never finished the lesson.
I think that’s when I sold my first story.
Writers make for the best of rebels. Especially the well-read ones!
(1) “Checker” is perfectly good American English and in fact is closer to the word’s Middle English original (“cheker”) than the British “chequer”, which first shows up with Caxton. The OED says of the noun, “Although the spelling checker is historically better supported, and more in accordance with Eng. usage, chequer predominates in current use; of 20 quotations since 1750, 16 have chequer, 2 checquer, 2 checker,” and of the verb, “Of 100 quotations since 1755, 70 have chequer, 21 checker, 9 checquer.” Both spellings are ultimately derived from the Medieval Latin word for chessboard, “scaccarium”.
(2) My sixth grade home room teacher Miss Peña, a pretty young thing who wore too much makeup and dressed a little too much like a tart, was appalled to see me reading Helen MacInnes’ The Venetian Affair, given to me by my mother. The book, being MacInnes, is a spy thriller and has no sex in it, but Miss P told me it was “too mature” for me. I suspect she was misled by the title and her own fervid imagination. She did not, however, forbid me from reading it.
Loved the column. Reminded me of when my mother caught me in my closet reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover with a flashlight. I was 16. She thought the literature a bit too much, I don’t know why since “she” hadn’t read it! I have since seen the light and read what I want, when I want and where I want.
Your checked, chequered, and definitely cheeky path to your future passion was very entertaining. I could visualize your (most likely but I’m not sure) animated, sarcastic facial expressions each year. The rebel with a cause. 
Leigh,
This one had me laughing out loud, literally. i don’t even remember most of my grade school years and of course never really being a literary arts fan (yes, I loved to read and still do, but being a military brat and moving every couple of years or so, means not many teachers made an impression on me or were really enthusiastic about teaching English (now called ELA in our schools)).
The one time I remember really disliking a teacher of English was when I moved back with my parents after spending a year living with my grandmother (my transition period of high school since my father was retiring in the middle of the school year and I was given a choice of livig with my grandmother for a year and going to a private high school that year or staying with my parents and transferring wherever we ended up when my father retired – I opted for the grandmother option) and I was the new student at the high school. The woman was so old then and rumor had it that she had been at the school since it first opened its doors (and I believe it too, I think she retired the year after I went through her class), and she was notorious for embarassing kids – I was very shy back then. I had to stand up in front of the class and tell my basic life story and where I had come from, why we landed in this rinky dink town, et cetera. I never did like her and my rebellion was to never read any of the required material. Don’t know how I made it out of her class but I survived with either an A or B and I was thankful it was over. The teachers in my high school seemed like such wusses (now that I think about it) in that we students got away with a lot of stuff; most of the teachers were just there to have an income for their family – they didn’t care if we did what we were supposed to or not, as long as most of the class passed their tests most of the time.
Thanks for sharing your story – I enjoyed it – E
Rebel with a cause! I like that, alisa.
ELA? That’s English Language _______?
I had great teachers, too. I had one teacher, Mrs. Hutchinson, only one year, before moving to a neighboring town. In retrospect, I wished I’d found a way to continue learning from her.
Two principals stand out in my mind, humorless, sadistic SOBs who should never have been allowed around children, Messrs. Hedricks and Fox. (So sue me, you bastards.) They felt threatened by children, I think.
Teachers were in my blood though, several ancestors on my mother’s side. Their brick one-room schoolhouse still stood when I was a kid, and we played basketball in it in the winter.
Perhaps for that reason, I’ve wound up having an inordinate number of teachers as friends (and girlfriends, too), and I know their dedication.
That’s the thing about teachers and how we feel about learning: We remember the really, really good– and the really, really bad.
ELA – English Language Arts – but they don’t teach anything resembling my English classes in grade/middle/or high school. We had a breakdown of grammar and literature – we had to read certain things (now in my kids’ middle school, only the honor English class has to read a required list during the summer and then throughout the year they discuss different books – to me this is more of a literature class than it is an English class)
The teachers I remember most were the math and science ones because those were the fun classes to me. I remember a few but not many – Mr. Brady, algebra teacher, Mr. Ligon, biology/chemistry teacher (and a quick check on the school’s faculty list shows him to be still teaching there 27 years after my graduation), Ms. Bebo, geometry teacher (had a high perecentage fail rate and was asked to resign the year after I went through her class) and in college, my psych 101 instructor, Dr. De’Angelo – great mentor.
So, yep we tend to remember the really, really good ones and the really, really bad ones – non in between – lol E 😉