Monday, May 31, 2010

Near the end of fourth grade, I was assigned my teacher for the following year. I found out that it would be Mrs. McDonough, the dreaded. I remember saying to myself on the way home that day that I couldn't believe that I was going to have the Old Battle Ax. I do not know where I got that name for her but I know that is how I thought of her.

She was old, her hair was white and all but gone on top. She was very strict and her favorite punishment, administered at the slightest infraction was to be made to write the same sentence such as, "I will not talk in class", over again until your hands were cramped in pain. She spent a part of each day reading aloud to the class from some work of literature or tell stories from her life and knowledge. She was strict but fair, ugly but with a depth of knowledge and character and a true passion for teaching.

My fifth grade year was her last year of teaching and, near the end of that year, the Phillips Elementary School of Watertown Massachusetts held a special assembly to honor her. We, her last students, participated. I remember thinking and telling my parents that she was the best teacher I ever had. I have not had a teacher since then or before who I felt that strongly about.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Real education must be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheepherding.
Ezra Pound

When I was in High School in the early 1970s, I took, as an elective a one semester course in Anthropology. My mother used to have us watch Channel 2 in Boston which did a series filmed by an anthropologist in the twenties. There were two silent films; one was about an eskimo, the other about south sea islanders. I remember the eskimo hunting seals through a hole in the ice and building an igloo; the south sea islanders filed their teeth and tatooed their entire bodies. Later, I was fascinated with a book we had in our house called Four Ways of Being Human, which featured four different cultures. So, out of that interest, I elected to take this short course in the subject.

Our teacher's name was Mrs. Kramer. She was a student teacher or a first year teacher, I don't remember exactly but she was young and I think, still attending one of the Universities near Boston. She was plain, not beautiful in the conventional sense, not vivacious or remarkable in her personality. But she was intelligent and diligent in her work teaching us. She, in one incident, made an impression on me that I have never forgotten.

She had brought a movie for us to watch. It was about negative stereotyping of blacks in Hollywood and it started with clips from Birth of a Nation and showed young black school boys struggling with their self image. The class, our class, was not paying any attention at all to the movie. Kids were talking and generally did not have any interest in it. That was when Mrs. Kramer stopped the film. She was furious. She yelled at us and told us that this was an important subject that we ought to care deeply about and she expressed such disappointment in us and so much passion about the movie and its subject that we were struck dumb and watched the rest of the movie in silence.

I have never forgotten that teacher and it has been almost forty years. And I went from uninformed and disinterested in racial injustice to passionate about it.