Carrol Vertrees: Teachers’ lessons go beyond book learning
Carrol Vertrees February 18, 2012 8:15PM
Carrol Vertrees
Updated: March 20, 2012 8:02AM
In my little Elnora school I had good teachers from A to Z.
There was Miss Ada and Mr. Harbstreit. You may notice a cultural quirk there — women teachers were called by their first names, as Miss Ada, Mrs. Minnie, Miss Berniece, etc.
The male teachers went by their last names, like Mr. Harbstreit, Mr. Burton, Mr. Nugent. Calling them Mr. Zed, as in Harbstreit, or Mr. Bob would have sounded funny.
Married women apparently were not supposed to be teachers, taking jobs away from husbands. I wonder if other small-town schools were into that discriminatory stuff.
Anyway, Miss Ada was a really bright first-grade teacher — she moved me into the second grade after only a month of observing my marvelous little mind. Heck, I could read Peter Rabbit without moving my lips and spell big words like accommodate. She often had me reading to the class.
I believe that she could see, or sense it intuitively, that I would become really good at writing love notes to girls. Sure enough, she was right.
One of my note targets was a girl named Ruthie Fielder — in fifth or sixth grade, I think. She never answered my notes — I handed them to her and fled — but I suspect that she was impressed.
At our 50th graduation anniversary I met her, but she did not mention the notes, probably because the big fellow with her was her husband. Mrs. V was with me, so it was better not to talk about those heady note-writing days.
Mr. Harbstreit, we called him Zed when he was not around, lost his cool one day in history class when he saw me zing Martha Lee Thompson with a spitball. He and I went into the hall — I was unarmed, but he had a paddle and he attacked me with it. Well, he delivered several taps, enough to get my attention without hurting much besides my pride.
I don’t remember that in our cultural enclave we talked much about corporal punishment. There wasn’t much of it. I may have been the paddle poster boy in Mr. Zed’s class. A light paddling was better, we thought, than a trip to the principal’s office to face a big fellow who always wore a frown.
We all remember teachers from the days of our youth, many of them fondly. I never got around to thanking Miss Ada for promoting me early, but I really did appreciate her confidence. Most of us probably don’t thank teachers enough, maybe because we are busy. It is a normal, but regrettable weakness that touches us all.
I suspect that good teachers feel a great satisfaction when they see students do well. Their goal, of course, is to challenge us, and that is what quality teachers do.
Stories and memories from little rural area schools may make today’s sophisticated school kids laugh, or wonder what the point is in looking back.
Looking back reminds us of where we were and how we got this far, and some of us remember that teachers at all levels helped us find the right path. Reading Peter Rabbit without a flaw was a big deal generations ago, before the technological age changed the way we learn. Each generation has its memories — holding on to memories is part of our learning.
I even learned a lesson from my encounter with Mr. Zed’s paddle. He taught me a lesson, not the book kind, but a tip on how to live: He was telling me “Don’t throw stuff at people.”
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