My Education In Brief

This past week, 23,000 teachers were laid off in the state of California. Facebook users responded by posting thoughts about the teachers who were important to them. This is what I wrote.

Getting Schooled in San Diego: 1968-1977

Wegeforth Elementary: fourth grade teacher Mr. Bush took the time to help a shy kid learn to play foursquare. He had a handlebar mustache with waxed tips. I don’t remember his first name, but his kindness endures.

Taft Junior High: I enrolled in a program called the Taft Interdisciplinary School (T.I.S.), which was run by a dozen or so dedicated teachers who worked together to integrate the curriculum and create a unique learning environment. I signed up at the end of sixth grade because I didn’t like school much and thought something different would be better. It was. So hats off to Russell Armstead (English), Bob Stein (social studies), and all the others. Cheers to Tom Stoup (English), who let me review comic books for class projects (hi, Tom!). Kudos to Mr. Bouchard (math), who never actually made good on his frequent threats to crush the heads of unruly students. And above all, love and respect to the late Carol Suley (English), who first encouraged me to write.

Kearny High School:

First of all, there was Clinton Owen (“NOT Owens!”), physics teacher. I was a terrible physics student, but I learned a lot from this man. He started us off by teaching us about scientific theory, using Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision as his starting point. An image of the Hindu god Ganesh hung at the front of the class. He moonlighted as a church organist, but wore a tie with a big question mark on it when he did so. Throughout 1976, he read to us daily from the National Lampoon’s Bicentennial Calendar, which featured such gems of American history as the Sand Creek Massacre. When there was a fire drill, he would have us close the blackout curtains that hung in his classroom and just keep teaching. His true mission was to teach us all to be individual and independent thinkers, and he damn well succeeded. He was also legendary for biting the heads off squids when he worked as a biology teacher, but that was before my time. And on some memorable occasions, he took a break from teaching and played us his Tom Lehrer records.

French teacher Robert Leeds was another Tom Lehrer fan, but that surprise came rather late in my time with him. Mr. Leeds seemed a dour, intimidating man at first, and it was only towards the end of my time in his classes (two years’ worth) that I realized what a kind and caring person he truly was. I was a terrible French student. How I managed two years of French at Taft, and another two with Leeds at Kearny, still baffles me. I was really only there because there was always at least one girl I had a crush on. Towards the end of my time in his classes, he took me aside, clearly frustrated by my pathetic lack of progress, and suggested that I try reading La Chanson de Roland in Old French. Surprisingly, I took to it quite well, but the year soon ended and my attempts at learning any sort of French came to an end. One day towards the end of that year – mirabile dictu! – he gave us a free period – and out came the Tom Lehrer records. As we listened to the master parodist’s songs, amazed at this sudden, unexpected lenience, I saw a smile play across Mr. Leeds’ lips, and realized that perhaps his frustration was not born of our stubborn refusal to learn the language, but from his deep desire to share this beloved language with us. Years later I learned his story. Robert Leeds was an Alsacian Jew who was persecuted by the Nazis and eventually fled to England. Fnnding refuge and humanity in Leeds, England, he adopted that city’s name as his own. He was fluent in German, but refused to teach the language, despite repeated entreaties from school administrators. Over twenty years ago he took his own life. His reserve, I suspect, was born from a deeply wounded soul. I wish I’d been a better student for him.

Karen Stuverud, the speech teacher, was also very influential. When I first got up to speak in that class in tenth grade, I corpsed completely and excused myself from the podium. After three years of working with her in class and on the speech team, you couldn’t get me to shut up. I would never have had the nerve to take part in school plays if not for her. She introduced me to the works of Ingmar Bergman, and also kept the secret of the underground paper that some of us operated in our senior year. Students were all to her; administrators were just a barely necessary evil (a view shared by Owen with great vehemence).

In tenth grade, all of us alleged honors students were corralled in a double classroom separated by a large curtain. This oversized class was operated by Ramona Barksdale and Viletta Hutchinson. The class was usually split, but the curtains were opened for student presentations, usually readings of essays and other writing projects. (Of especial note, a certain Irish-American fellow’s speech about sexual innuendo in Shakespeare.) Mrs. Barksdale would often interrupt the beginning of a student’s performance with the piercing question “Where’s your thesis statement?” And when a student’s voice struck her as monotonous, she would drop that already basso profundo voice of hers down another notch and intone the order to “MODULATE!” That previous sentence would never have passed muster with her; in her world, one should never start a sentence with “and.” Along with Miss Hutchinson, she drilled the basic mechanics of writing into our heads in the course of a challenging and memorable year.

In eleventh grade, it was time for Advanced American Literature, a.k.a. AdvAmLit, taught by the redoubtable Peggy Kirby. To call Mrs. Kirby’s wit dry would be an understatement. Her influence on me was profound. She watered the writing seed planted in my brain by Carol Suley and it took root permanently. She could be quite withering, but her intent was always to teach, not to belittle. (It didn’t seem that way to Mike Chaparro the day she rebutted his defensive “But it’s my opinion!” with “But it’s a limp opinion.”) True, we had to read The Scarlet Letter in her class, but she made it relatively painless. She even endured a student presentation on the Beats, for whom she had little patience. And we wrote and wrote and wrote in that class. And then we wrote some more. And most, if not all, of us loved it. Speaking of love, Peggy Donohue (Chula Vista High School, Class of 1948) married her high school sweetheart John “Jack” Kirby (no, not that Jack Kirby) the year they graduated together. As far as I know, they still live in their beautiful Victorian house on Banker’s Hill. Time, I think, to pay them a visit. This essay might rate a B-minus on the Kirby scale, but I’m probably flattering myself.

Twelfth grade brought us back under the care of Miss Viletta Hutchinson, a very proper lady who slept exactly eight hours a night, and had once lived in the YWCA when she first moved to San Diego, back in some distant age beyond our comprehension. “Hutch,” as some of us affectionately called her (but never to her face), seemed impossibly old. Years later, I came across a 1948 Kearny yearbook in a used book store, and there she was on the faculty page: hair dark rather than gray, prim as ever, already an institution. When she passed away in 2003, she was just a few months shy of her ninety-first birthday; most of us probably thought she was already that old in 1976. She was never a “hip” teacher (and none of those have ever stood the test of time), but she was a real teacher, old school in every sense of the word, dedicated to her task and undeterred by shifting trends. Baffled as she was by our constant Monty Python references (notably during an in-class reading of Shaw’s Saint Joan, where we played the French soldiers as if they came right out of The Holy Grail) and other tomfoolery, she shepherded us with care and affection, and never wavered in the practice of her life’s calling.

Skipping ahead more than thirty years, I’d like to write a few words about another great teacher, my dear friend Elizabeth “Beth” Cullen. Miss Cullen, pink-haired and magical, teaches third grade. Many of her students speak little English; Beth, fluent in Spanish, nurtures them all. I know this because I have heard her speak of her students often over the years I have known her. I recently said to her, “You really love your students, don’t you? Even the bad ones.”

“Especially the bad ones,” she replied. And in that moment my mind finally realized what my heart had suspected all along: all these teachers (with perhaps one exception, but I wouldn’t bet money even on that) loved their students. Deeply. They don’t get paid what they’re worth, the hours they spend in class are nothing compared to all the work they do when the students aren’t there, and still they work to educate and to serve. They deserve better than the treatment they receive from the great state of California. They made us what we are. Why the hell do we shortchange them? Discuss.

Copyright © 2010 by Dan Whitworth. All rights reserved.