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english teachers

I remember all their first names, too, but of everyone, English teachers seem like the group likeliest to have Writing.com accounts, to recognize themselves and then me and cause all hell to break loose, somehow. I'm just trying to minimize the chances of that happening.

And, a note, however horrifically braggy any of this sounds, remember, I was always only an average student. I can probably count on two hands the number of As I've actually earned in my life.

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Mrs. Leonhart, preschool. I started at three and a half and was already reading, one of the only kids in class who could, so I held a strict monopoly over the book corner. It was a Montessori school, focused on child-directed activity, so we spent the majority of the day sitting around the room on little squares of carpet, doing whatever appealed to us most. We were halfway through the year before Mrs. Leonhart realized I'd read all the books on the bookshelf and was extending their usefulness by starting to color in them.

Besides the Montessori school, I only did a year in private school, for kindergarten, under Miss Mulcahy, who halfway through the year became Mrs. Kelly. As a testament to the inherent superiority of an elite private school education, Miss Mulcahy couldn't spell the word carrot. She also, I think, resented that my language arts skills were better than my classmates'. Either that or the school's method dictated that teachers should limit the range of reading levels among their students. We had free time during recess and the whole second half of the day, and she openly discouraged me from spending that time reading the books I brought from home. Besides me, only two other kids, out of fifteen, could read by the end of the school year.

Miss Oberdorf is a great big blank in my mind. I remember what she looked like (big, frumpy in the way of all elementary school teachers, her hair feathered a la 1991), and I remember that she liked pets, that we had lots of them throughout that year. I don't remember the books we read (maybe some of those Tomie de Paola books?), but I remember, maybe, or maybe I'm making this up, that it was Miss Oberdorf who taught me to capitalize the first word in every sentence. Before that, I was capitalizing erratically, wherever I felt like it, then eventually every single word. She fixed that out of me, and truly, though I don't remember much else about her, that's probably the most significant mark any of them left on me.

Ms. Schultz-Ferrell introduced me to The Baby-Sitters Club, which as a series, I kid you not, armed me with ninety percent of my present-day common sense and knowledge base. I learned about diabetes, divorce, racism, synchronized swimming, first aid, infant care and ethnic surnames, and I became totally addicted to those books, which my mom declared were "the literary equivalent of candy." Ms. Schultz-Ferrell was Jewish and assertive, with an edgy haircut and a wardrobe ten times funkier than that of any other teacher I'd ever known, so I adored her. She was also divorced, like a quarter of the moms in Stoneybrook (in which the Baby-Sitters Club books were set), and I felt like I was becoming really worldly, under her tutelage. She shared my birthday week, and she pronounced the name of our birthstone amestyst. I was pretty sure that was wrong, but I was too timid to correct her.

Third grade, Mrs. Lacroix-White. The second hyphenated name in a row, except that where Ms. Schultz-Ferrell held onto her ex-husbands' Ferrell to maintain unity with her kids, Mrs. Lacroix-White was a newlywed, with a lovey picture of Mr. White on her desk. Third graders are annoying. We were in a phase, at the time, where we considered Shel Silverstein's poetry to be the highest art. On our good days, Mrs. L-W (as she allowed us to call her, because some of us pathologically pronounced her former surname Lacory) would end the school day by playing a recording of Shel Silverstein reading aloud from one of his books, and halfway through "Eighteen Flavors," right around the line that ends with fudge banana, we would erupt into loud, crazed laughter that lasted through the end of the recording. I have no idea how the poem goes after the third line.

Mrs. Williams was the hardest-ass teacher I ever had. She was my first black teacher, one of the most respected in the county, and because the fourth- and fifth-grade magnet program was designed to groom us for a magnet middle school, she had a huge list of objectives we had to achieve by the end of the year. First on that list was touch-typing, as she called it. She wanted us each at sixty words per minute by the end of the first semester. Some of us made it, others didn't. I was the second-fastest in the class, eighty-four at my fastest (with like eighty-five percent accuracy), and in a bitter rivalry with Scott, who was beating me by eight words per minute. It was a game to us, with prizes built in--Pizza Hut coupons, indoor recess privileges. Too, this was 1994, when computers weren't as obvious a classroom resource as they are today. We had two computers to be used by twenty-five students, and Mrs. Williams herself only typed something like forty-five words per minute. It chokes me up, literally, to think of it today, that she recognized that early how badly we'd need this skill later, and made sure to develop it in all of us. Today I average about one hundred twenty-five words per minute with pretty consistent accuracy, and I am always surprised at how impressed other people are. I worked a job two summers ago where both my coworkers were slaves to the hunt-and-peck process, which seemed just awful to me. Also, at the end of my year with Mrs. Williams, I won the "Most Prolific Reader and Writer" award, which seemed like a high honor at the time. It wasn't till much later that I learned prolificacy is about quantity, not quality. Jodi Picoult is prolific, churning out thirty and forty novels a month, but her books are terrible. Ouch, Mrs. Williams.

Fifth grade's Mrs. Wagner hated me, but she loved books. She was of the mind that even ten-year-olds benefit from being read to, and both read-aloud and DEAR ("drop everything and read") were parts of our daily routine. She selected and read all our read-aloud books. Tina remembers all of them, I only remember the ones I liked. This was the point at which I started to suspect that maybe I had some sort of aural learning deficiency, because as high as my comprehension was when it came to the books I read independently, I never remembered, on a day-to-day basis, any details from the books Mrs. Wagner was reading to us. Novels, like Waiting for Anya and Walk Two Moons, so the continuity was critical, and everyone else seemed more engrossed than I was, always.

Sixth grade marked the beginning of my time at a humanities-based magnet program, where the learning was all interdisciplinary, meaning everything I did in my Reading and Writing classes (which were separate) was echoed in every other class. Under Mrs. Vestal, a dear old woman who was badly crippled by her advanced-stage scleroderma, I learned more, I would say, about the vastness of the literary world than I ever did anywhere else. We had to write expository essays, Greek satyr plays, shitty preteen poetry (some of which I found in my parents' closet this year and almost died, it was so disproportionately awful), flash fiction and longer fiction. Mrs. Vestal was the first teacher, after Mrs. Williams (whose praise, remember, we have to take with a grain of salt, because she used the P-word), to give me special attention for being particularly good at something other than standardized test-taking. She designed our fiction unit around me specifically, because I was most excited about it, When she read what I had written, a short story set two hundred years in the future, about a kid who sets out to revitalize the animal population after every species of nonhuman animal goes extinct, Mrs. Vestal conferenced with my parents to encourage them to send me to advanced fiction workshops and try to get some of my stuff published. My mom mailed that story to Highlights. I got a formal rejection letter, explaining that Highlights has a policy of only printing the work of its salaried writers, and a personal note from the editor, explaining that the reason they really didn't print it was just that it was too long. He praised the piece highly, though, and urged me to submit it to a bunch of student publications, which I never did.

In seventh grade, my classmates and I gave Ms. Lundahl hell, having just realized we weren't actually compelled, except by our ingrained sense of duty, to do any schoolwork. The first book on our reading list was Don Quixote, which I didn't read. The second book was Canterbury Tales, which I did read, and I hated it so much, I didn't read anything else Mrs. Lundahl assigned all year. That was sort of the beginning of the end. The longer you can keep a kid from realizing she doesn't have to do anything she doesn't want to, the better.

Eighth grade, though, reversed the curse. Ms. Powell-Cajder was funny, bubbly and idealistic, and she drew our disenchanted souls right back in. She was only twenty-three, younger than I am now, and we were her maiden voyage. She had all these incredible, completely undoable ideas, none of which she attempted again with the class after ours. We made a huge mess of each one, but we had fun doing it, so I was into English again, and back to writing creatively for fun. I don't think Ms. Powell-Cajder personally thought I was that great a writer, but she was constantly conferencing with my English teachers from the previous two years, and reporting back about all the glowing things Mrs. Vestal continued to say about me. It was like she was expecting more from me, based on my reputation. All the work I turned in was totally fine, I maintain that, but I got ninety percents on just about everything.

Ninth grade, the fabulous Mrs. Tomayko. She was older, in her late fifties or so, and I loved her more than I'd ever loved any teacher. I was in a math/science magnet, then, and I hated it, so her class was like an oasis for me, my last class of the day, the if-I-can-just-make-it-to-eighth-period-I-won't-kill-myself point. What I liked best about her was that I never felt held back. If I finished my work early, she gave me a choice: move onto the next thing, or take some free time to read something, write something. She had perfect, delicate handwriting, and I savored every comment she ever printed on every assignment I ever turned in. I was the most talented person in her class, she said. She recommended me to the chair of the English department to go into a journalism class the following year, making me one of only a handful of science nerds to wind up on our school's newspaper. Years later, the semester before graduation, I had a free period, which I spent playing assistant in Mrs. Tomayko's new English class, and I was amazed at how young and untalented the ninth-graders seemed.

In tenth grade, I had the forgettable Mrs. Ernst. She was short, stocky and entirely unfun, and she didn't try to hide her favoritism at all. She was in love with my friend Anita, who was the biggest academic sycophant you can imagine. By contrast, I think I just annoyed Mrs. Ernst, because I realized early on how mediocre she was as a writer and a teacher, and I was always obnoxiously correcting her in class. I think I also thought she was racist, but I forget why.

Eleventh grade marked the start of my time on the newspaper, and my other classes started to lose meaning after that. All my friends were on the paper too, and I spent most lunch periods in the newsroom, not necessarily working on anything, just sort of loitering and feeling good about myself because I had, at least, a nominal purpose there. Within our contained little bubble of self-importance, we journalists had some notoriety, and because not everyone who wanted to got to be on the paper, we considered ourselves some of the best writers at the school. We probably were, too, but journalism has almost nothing in common with expository writing. No transferrable skills, but I didn't realize that till later. I slacked off big time in Mrs. Fleischaker's AP English class. I liked Mrs. Fleischaker (pronounced "fly-shaker," which gave us endless entertainment), I thought she was pretty and elegant and good at her job, but I wasn't interested in rising to her considerable challenges. I convinced myself I didn't have time to do the reading for her class (which was bullshit, I wasted hours every night in high school reading X-Files fanfic), and I half-assed all the written assignments, which drove her crazy. My grades on the papers I wrote for Mrs. Fleischaker never exceeded an eighty-five, and her comments were like jabs to the heart, succinct and true but painful. "You are a fine stylist, but we need to work on your textual analysis," she wrote on an essay in which I failed to substantiate my thesis with a single direct quote from the novel. "You occasionally try too hard for complexity," she wrote after a book review I'd puffed up with all sorts of overblown language. She was just about the only teacher I never came close to fooling, which made her one of my favorites. I got a B in her class, twice, but I got a five on the AP exam.

And lastly, Mrs. Adamson. Black but married to a white guy, a Takoma Parker, rabidly liberal, creative, amazing. I already knew her because she had interviewed me before I was allowed in to that journalism class, so she let me sign up for her American Studies class, overwriting the English department mandate that it could only include a certain number of magnet students. We were both obsessed with The X-Files and started every Monday debriefing the previous night's episode. She was working on a novel, which she later self-published. I got to read the rough manuscript, of which she had several copies in her basement, bound in green leather. She treated me to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory after I graduated, wanting to hear my thoughts on what she'd written. I baby-sat her sons once that summer, too. If I ever publish anything, I'm sure I'll dedicate it to her.

Which is terrible of me, because, having written this out, I count at least seven English teachers who had an incredible hand in making me the person I am today. I didn't remember half this stuff till now. I only remembered that Mrs. Adamson bought me cheesecake.

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I graduated from one of the best public school systems in the country. It kind of sucks that I really have no choice but to raise my kids in the same system. I can't stand the thought that they wouldn't have all the opportunities I had before they turned eighteen.