I Am Skeptical of Teachers

This may cause the hairs to rise on the necks and arms of teacher friends of mine. I am genuinely sorry. There are some wonderful teachers who do a superb job of educating and enriching the lives of their students. I will write separately about my biggest (negative) experiences with teachers, but a funny story comes to mind this afternoon that I want to share.

For this, we go back to my elementary school days, when dinosaurs rode around in Model T Fords and Velveeta cheese was a gourmet item.

Actually, it was in second grade when two very strange things happened.

First, this was the year they separated the “readers” by their skills. There were three groups: Bluebirds, Redbirds, and Robins. I’ll bet you can figure out who went where. Suffice it to say that I was a Bluebird. We had a fairly small group, and read first, while the Redbirds and Robins read at their desks.

Redbirds read second. They were sincere readers, and made reasonable progress, but the long pauses between the words made it very difficult to follow the story. Poor Dick and Jane, staggering through their adventures with Spot.

And then came the Robins. I tried not to listen, but the mistakes in their reading sounded like the wrong keys on a piano. It was all I could do not to jump up and say, “Let me just read that for you”.

Let me just say one more thing about this. Could there be any less motivational naming system than Bluebird, Redbird, and ROBIN?

Here’s the second thing. One day, a “special teacher” came from the school district to take on a matter they thought was Very Important for us to master.  So important, they sent her for an Official Visit.

It seems that we were making “5” the wrong way.  I swear this is true.  The Kansas City, Missouri School District had developed a Special Program to make sure EVERY second grader made “5” the same way, the right way, and the orthodox way.  Until that day, we had actually made “5” any way we wanted. I don’t even remember any conversation about the subject. Most of us – me included - made “5” like an angular “S” – start at the upper right, go left, straight down, then make a half circle.  There you are. You’re done. The pencil stays on the paper, it’s speedy and efficient and theoretically legible.

But for all my status as the leading Bluebird, I was wrong. This self-important woman (I remember a heaving bosom) was on a Mission. She had fire in her eyes, and was prepared to battle with us over the issue. 

She explained, with a curling lip, that the Only Way to properly make a “5” was to do the vertical, then the circle at the bottom. The top horizontal was to be put on last, “as a gentleman puts on his hat”. Really. I made the mistake of questioning this paragon of education about why we were making this change and what the benefit was going to be. Oh my stars and garters! (Rarely can one say this, but it works here.) This Special Teacher nearly exploded. I’m glad she didn’t because I suspect she was filled, like a piñata, with bits of chalk and flash cards and old pencil nubs.

My regular teacher explained to me, later, that we were just going to go along with this change, because it came from District.

I am clearly an anarchist. I never changed how I made my “5’s” and I still haven’t.