the rix mix

I thought about my 7th grade History / English teacher today. Beats me why. I recall his appearance but not anything I learned in his classes. He taught both subjects to 7th graders & they were all he taught. I was stuck with him two periods every day. He was an awful teacher. The classroom had blackboards (I think they were green) covering two walls of the room. Many days, for one subject or the other, more often history, he would the fill the boards with notes written in a cramped if readable cursive, probably from a daily plan he'd been recycling for years. The teaching consisted of him reading what he had written while we copied it into our notebooks. Of course, all his classes that day got the same crap. Having arrived in middle school from the one-teacher, one-classroom routine of K-6, this was a horrendous introduction to the remaining years of public school edjikation.

In 8th grade, I had a pair of memorable teachers for those two subjects. Mr. Gelfond, the History teacher, was a fine storyteller - a necessary talent, although when exasperated he felt forced to halt discussion & make the class read the previous night's assigned text again. The English teacher, Miss Heathwood (yes, old with jiggly fat on her upper arms) was very strict, demanded that boys button the top button on our shirts & called us "Bowery bums." She made us memorize a bad poem, "Opportunity" by Edward Rowland Still. I liked rhyming poetry & I didn't stutter when I recited it to Miss Heathwood - we all recited it to her, individually & quietly, standing in front of her desk. The lesson was about memorizing, not poetry. For years afterward, I misremembered the poem as being by Tennyson, because we also read Tennyson in Miss Heathwood's class, selections from Idylls of the King. I loved Tennyson. I can't imagine any kid encountering AlfredTennyson in school nowadays. Maybe that's a good thing. Not such a good thing if kids aren't meeting Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman. Poetry is a leisurely area of literature prior to college, & only a portion of teachers even like poetry enough to enjoy teaching it. I had exactly three, in 4th, 8th, & 12th grades. Maybe poets get left behind so no child is at test time.

Labels: education, growing up