Mrs. M. was obsessed with space.
It was all over her classroom. Huge posters of the nine planets. Massive charts depicting the solar system. Moons and stars and comets and meteors and all manner of celestial objects.
Rumor had it Mrs. M. had even applied for the Teacher In Space Project a few years prior. Suffice it to say, she didn't make the finals. Maybe it was her advanced age. I'd like to think that if the program had chosen people based on their enthusiasm for space, Mrs. M. would have been sent up in the first rocket available and left to orbit the globe indefinitely.
Back on earth, though, she was a fourth grade teacher. She ran our school's Young Astronauts program. She took kids on field trips to air shows.
But I did not want her as my fourth grade teacher.
I didn't mind that she was the oldest teacher in our school -- just one year away from retirement, in fact. She looked like a cute little old granny, the kind that bakes gingerbread men and then watches in dismay as they leap out of the oven and make a bid for freedom. She also could have passed for Mrs. Claus if the situation demanded it. She seemed very, very old.
Actually, she was sixty-four.
What I did mind was all that SPACE. I didn't care one iota about Neptune or Andromeda or what the heck was on the other side of the moon. If Mrs. M had been obsessed with cats, maybe we could've bonded. But space? Blah.
But there it was, right there on her class roster in September, 1989 -- my name. There was no helping it. I was doomed to spend fourth grade with Mrs. M.
"I'm sure she'll be a fine teacher," my parents tried to assure me.
"But she's obsessed with space," I replied. I was convinced that all of curriculum in Mrs M.'s classroom would be coming straight from the archives at NASA.
On the first day of school, as Mrs. M. explained the classroom procedures, I was actually excited to learn that she had something in the back of her classroom she called "The Laboratory." WELL! Flasks, beakers, test tubes, chemicals?!? Now that was some science I could get behind!
It took me about half a day to realize that there wasn't a laboratory at the back of the classroom. No, actually, that's where she kept the passes... to the lavatory.
The freaking bathroom.
Mrs. M. didn't like to be corrected. You may be asking, who does? But my previous teacher -- the warm, kind, sweet Mrs. R. -- had always been open to feedback. If she was writing on the chalkboard and left off a comma, she didn't mind if one of her students raised a hand to tell her so. She'd smile and correct her "mistake," happy that we were keen enough to notice a need for punctuation.
When we tried that with Mrs. M., she thought we were being insolent, and barked at us to stop raising our hands and trying to correct her.
I remember one day in particular, Mrs. M. was being so mean -- I don't even remember what she did, but she was mean, dangit -- and some us kids gathered in solidarity at recess. One of my classmates -- all 4 ft. 3 inches of her -- announced that she was going to tell her mom to tell the school board to get Mrs. M. fired. For a few days, we had hope that this would happen. That we would come to school one morning and find a sweet, kindly teacher (maybe Miss Nelson?) sitting at Mrs. M's desk. But nothing ever came of it.
Sometimes Mrs. M could be quite pleasant. I ended up joining the Young Astronauts program that she coordinated. It met Wednesdays after school. That year, Mrs. M. had this grandiose plan to construct a living-room-sized bubble out plastic. It was to be constantly inflated by a box fan. I helped construct it. And it worked! In our classroom, we ended up taking turns, in groups of 4 or 5, spending all day inside the bubble, doing our schoolwork in there and pretending it was a space station. (We were allowed trips outside to the bathr -- uh lavatory, if need be.) We ate that freeze-dried Astronaut Ice Cream stuff, which felt like a treat.
Outside the bubble, the busywork she gave us was a bit much. Each week, she'd assign huge packets of homework. There was always at least one worksheet that demanded I put words into alphabetical order. I hated it. I was terrible at it. I slowly plodded my way through the packet each week, sometimes finishing it, sometimes not.
And then there were the times she made me cry.
The first time, we were doing some kind of paper-folding activity with a group of kids from the grade below. Mrs. M. was demonstrating what to do. I couldn't keep up. I've never been great at following "movement" directions. I had a heck of a time in dance classes later on in life. It wasn't that I couldn't learn the steps -- I was just slower to catch on than most.
So there I was, trying my best to follow Mrs. M.'s paper-folding directions, and I was falling behind. And then she spoke directly to me. I don't remember her exact words, but it was essentially this: "Molly, I expected you to be able to do this activity and set an example for the younger students."
Yeouch. And she said this in front of those younger students.
And so I cried. And she didn't care.
A few months later, we were supposed to be making beavers out of clay. The beaver is Oregon's state animal, and we were in the throes of our Oregon History unit. In fact, that very night we were having an event at school where we all had to dress as pioneers. My parents had helped me construct a covered wagon model, which was being pulled by Playmobil oxen (or possibly cows.)
But that clay beaver was a challenge. I'd never been good with clay. Perhaps that was because we weren't given too many opportunities to use it. And now we were given a lump of it and expected to make a beaver.
And Mrs. M. kept coming around and berating me because my beaver's tail wasn't flat enough.
And no matter how hard I tried to make the tail perfect, it wasn't good enough, and she let me know it.
And I began to cry. She didn't care.
And when I went home that afternoon, I told my parents I did NOT want to go to the pioneer event at school that evening. But they made me go anyway. And I had to walk into my classroom, now wearing a bonnet, and pretend like I didn't have the keen desire to chuck 28 clay beavers at my teacher's face.
Actual photo of me channeling my inner Nellie Oleson and contemplating the throwing of 28 clay beavers.
For years afterward, I resented Mrs. M. for these moments. I partly blamed her for the fact that I was hesitant to pursue art classes in high school. I loved art, but Mrs. M. had made it clear that art wasn't supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be perfect. And if it wasn't up to her standards, you were going to hear about it.
It wasn't until I became a teacher's assistant as an adult that I finally came to realize Mrs. M. was only human. She'd been unkind, yes, but I don't think she was deliberately malicious. She was in her sixties, just one year away from retirement. I've found that a lot of teachers in that stage of teaching tend to be unyielding. If their methods have worked for 30 years, why bother to change? Who cares if the kids are not all right?
Looking at our class photo, I know it couldn't have been an easy year for Mrs. M. I see several faces that I recall as being troublemakers. Maybe she was just over it.
Still, out of all the teachers I had in elementary school, Mrs. M. was the only one who made me feel so terrible.
It's hard to let that go.
All I can do now is try to be less like her, and more like my beloved Mrs. R, Mr. S., or Mr. M.
Thank goodness for them.
