Having just turned 50, I take a look back at (my) early education in the 1970s and 80s...

A meandering, rambling, unrestrained, nostalgic, completely self-indulgent set of reminiscences, in flagrant violation of everything I've ever taught to any of my English Composition students in terms of coherence, clarity, or conciseness. If you have an hour to kill, enjoy this interactive (lots of links, like exhibits at a museum) tour through the first third of my life. There may or may not be a point to it all: ten thousand words. But I don't actually care.

If you are of a certain age, what do you remember about grade school?

I remember Lucille Veal. Just barely. The State University of New York, Cortland’s “Campus School” was housed in Van Houten Hall, and Miss Veal’s pre-kindergarten classroom was room number B-33. That I remember. I always had a knack for numbers and trivia.

As a wee lad, I loved school, and over the next thirteen or so years, little happened, a few bumps in the road aside, to change that opinion. Naturally, my experiences led me to want to become a teacher, and so I did. Just in time for the era of Big Standardized Testing. Yay. But that just made the nostalgia sweeter, I suppose... 

The following is a grotesquely self-indulgent exercise, but I just turned fifty, so I'm going to do whatever the hell I want right now.

First Years (1974-1978: pre-K through 4th grade)

I don’t remember Miss Veal’s voice, or even any particular incident or conversation involving her. I just remember her existence, and the feeling that accompanied knowing she existed. My memories of pre-kindergarten are spotty, but certain moments stand out clearly – how wretchedly I played pick-up sticks, a particular table I used to sit at for lunch, a certain blouse decorated with strawberries that one special girl in the class used to wear. In short, I remember the class fondly, and by extension, I suppose, Miss Veal. Somewhere I still have the card she mailed to welcome me from pre-K into kindergarten; the envelope was addressed to “Master” Andrew King, a title that I’m pretty sure fell out of common usage within five minutes of her using it, right along with calling little boys “dapper” on school picture day, or relaxing in the afternoon with a good book on the davenport.

The year was 1974. In addition to giving me all the enrichment work I could handle (I was one of those freakish kids who was years ahead in everything), my two oldest friends, friends I still claim to this day, some 45+ years later, were in the class with me. Truly halcyon days; at least, that's the way it feels now.

I left kindergarten early, bumped up to first grade at Smith Elementary School, a public elementary school just two blocks from my house; it was either just shy of or just after my 5th birthday. I used to walk to school every day, even at that age; an army of crossing guards helped guide the way. Now, my children’s current school district requires that all kindergartners and first graders be accompanied by a parent just to walk to the bus stop, which, in my children’s case, is all of half a block away. My children were not allowed to walk to school, period, until junior high, and even then, it was "discouraged."

My first-grade teacher was Mrs. Allen. I remember on the walls of her classroom small posters of strange cartoon figures for each letter of the alphabet, each figure an anthropomorphic letter clothed and decked out in various articles that began with that letter. Each character had a corresponding song; I think the songs must have been on some old 45 records. Letter R sang about “ripping rubber bands,” whatever that meant, and poor letter X, since so little really begins with X, could only lament in his song that he was “all wrong, X.” I understand they’ve changed the program, called The Letter People. Mr. R no longer rips rubber bands – too dangerous – and X is no longer “all wrong” – too politically incorrect; now he’s just “different.” I suppose that’s just the way things go in a brave new world.

Mrs. Edwards was my second grade teacher, and she made darn sure we all know our times tables through 10 by the end of the year, by rote, and with automaticity! That’s a third-grade standard now, I think. Isn’t that the direction of all things? Read my condemnation of the direction that the NCTM took math standards during the late 80s and 90s, and from which we still have never recovered, here.

Mrs. Minielli and Mrs. Inventasch were my third-grade and fourth grade teachers. Third grade was the first year I remember actually having homework. Mrs. Minielli would give us a list of spelling words, twenty, if I recall correctly, though it may have been twenty-five, and we would have to write each word three times, and then use each word in an original sentence. On Fridays we would take a spelling test on that week’s list of words. Mrs. Minielli would post our weekly spelling tests up on a special bulletin board if we got a 100% (teachers would never do that now, it might make the other kids who didn’t get 100% feel bad). If we got consecutive hundreds, she would let them accumulate, to show off our “winning streaks.” I had a stack of 25 consecutive perfect scores, as did Kathy, the school librarian’s daughter and a girl in my class with whom I did enrichment work. It became a friendly competition. And on the 26th test, when I shamefully left the second “p” out of the word “pumpkin,” I was admittedly relieved to see that she had suffered the same fate, albeit courtesy of a different word, our impressive stacks of perfect tests cast away in solidarity, our streaks locked for all time in a tie at twenty-five. Nowadays, posting student work in this fashion is an absolute no-no, as any "modern thinker" will tell you that competition is damaging and destructive to children. And heaven forbid students be asked to practice spelling by rote. Correct spelling is so hegemonic! Or something.

In Mrs. Inventasch’s class, one day we created a huge cardboard “robot” that I and another student hid inside. There was an input slot where students would write questions on index cards and slide them in; we would take them, craft answers to the questions on the back of the cards, and slide them out the output slot, like a big know-it-all ATM. Of course, I’m sure the answers weren’t always right, and for the life of me I have no idea what particular lesson precipitated the creation of the thing in the first place, but at the end of the school day, Mrs. Inventasch put all of our names in a hat to see who would win the privilege of taking the cardboard creation home, and I won. In the timeless words of the poet Ice Cube, “I have to say, it was a good day.” Both Mrs. Minielli and Mrs. Inventasch were kind and nurturing, and a lot of fun, and I remember them positively, even if I don’t really remember them well.

I was doing a lot of independent study at Smith School because I was a bit on the precocious side, so I got to do all kinds of interesting things (well, I thought they were interesting). I had finished the entire series of Lipincott readers by first grade. I discovered Paula Danziger and Judy Blume, the J.K Rowlings of the seventies, and read them avidly, in the second grade. I was working in a mathematics series brought down from the Junior/Senior High School in the third grade. When other kids were reading children’s and YA chapter books for their third grade book reports, I did mine on The Snare of the Hunter by Helen MacInnes. I also wrote a (kid’s version of a) mathematical treatise on the impossibility of Santa Claus based on the earth’s size and estimated travel times that year. (I'm just waiting for somebody to jump on the symbolism of that one; anyone wanna quote me Whitman's Learn'd Astronomer?)

I fear that nowadays, teachers and counselors would put the brakes on a child like that, screaming “developmentally inappropriate!” After all, some folks believe that not only is precociousness developmentally dangerous and destabilizing, but the precocious student makes his or classmates feel “bad” for their comparative lack of precociousness; it’s just not fair. Not to mention the extra burden it places on a school staff. Simply shameful, like something out of a dystopian novel:

“We… were not happy in those years in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked upon us.” (Anthem, Rand, ch. 1)

Oh, is your first response at seeing that I have quoted Rand is, "Oh, he's a right-wing nutjob?" Bite me: a.) Not true (registered D), otherwise I certainly would not be teaching in Ithaca, New York right now, and b.) Anthem is a classic piece of dystopian fiction that predates 1984 by a decade and to which Orwell owes perhaps no small measure of gratitude, Anthem basically being a semi-plagiarized version of Evgeny Zamyatin's We. Read my blog post on it here. But not being a right-wing nut-job does not mean I cannot call out progressiveness when its wanton emoting occasionally flies in the face of common sense or robust pedagogy. To wit, I’m sure there are some out there are shaking their heads in despair at a childhood senselessly sacrificed to some elitist parents’ vision of academic excellence. Well, I was a pretty normal kid. I played outside, I loved going to the park, I watched maybe a little too much television, I was addicted to my Spirograph (how the hell is that toy NOT in the Toy Hall of Fame?), I was convinced that I could ride faster than anyone else on my Big Wheel. On occasional Saturday mornings, I would go fishing at the crack of dawn with my father on Little York Lake; on other Saturdays we would go bowling (I was terrible at it, but I loved it). The other Saturdays, I was up at the crack of dawn to watch all my favorite cartoons – Josie and the Pussycats, Captain Caveman, Dick Dastardly and Muttley, The Wacky Races, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Hong Kong Phooey, Grape Ape, Magilla Gorilla, The Jetsons, Fat Albert, and the especially Super Friends. 

And let us not forget: Schoolhouse Rock.

Perhaps my favorite thing to do when I was really young was to go with my father to his office in the Old Main building at SUNY Cortland, where he was (still is) a professor, and roam the expansive and high-ceilinged hallways, exploring, while he met with students, or returned phone calls, or graded papers, or attended meetings. I remember the so-called “computer rooms”; I thought the punch cards looked so cool, though I had no idea what they were for. I specifically remember the men’s room stalls on the second floor of Old Main were all solid oak (I don’t know why I remember that) and the soap dispensers above the sinks gave out this harsh-smelling powdered stuff that was abrasive, but I found it fascinating, the way it felt as I ground my hands together with ever-increasing fury in a vain attempt to generate lather, which may never actually have been the powder's purpose. The grand stairwells, old woodwork, and polished floors were, to me at the time, like something out of a mansion in an old movie. And of course, the college kids themselves seemed like the most towering and worldly grown-ups (suffice it to say that, after 15 years or so of college teaching, this perception has changed a bit). 

My mother worked occasionally as one of those ladies in stores who would give free tastes of food items; I would go to work with her on the weekends sometimes, or walk to her store from home (especially when she was sampling Tony’s frozen pizzas) and roam up and down the aisles of the store, passing by her kiosk and taking samples. Lather, rinse, repeat. I would space out my return visits so it wasn’t obvious that I was eating so much, even though I'm sure I wasn't as good a ninja as I thought I was. The net result was that after an hour or two, I might have had the equivalent of a full frozen pizza, or maybe even more. Perhaps that explains my obsession, that stubbornly lingers to this very day, for boxed pizzas. 

At home, we used to clip coupons together, my mother and I, and one of my greatest joys was returning glass milk bottles and soda containers for their deposits, and then shopping with my mom with all the coupons we had clipped. Maybe because I was a precocious math geek, I loved both shopping for, and reading the nutrition panels of, food packages. [Note to self: Knowledge is not wisdom. To wit: By age seven or eight, I knew all of the vitamins and minerals listed on the side panel of a box of cereal in order, and even their proper chemical names, as well as what functions in the body they aided, but clearly, as I ended up a rather fat adult, I didn’t really ever apply that knowledge meaningfully!]

Plus, I simply loved elementary school in general, and my elementary school in particular. Around the time of the bicentennial, our class choir sang “Fifty Nifty United States,” a song that required the memorization of all 50 states in alphabetical order, a list (and a melody) I have never forgotten. I took trumpet (cornet) lessons, though I was pretty terrible. Odd, since I eventually became an avid music lover, musician, and songwriter. I would buy orange Push-Ups for a nickel in the school cafeteria, and after lunches on some days, they would show films; one, a bicycle safety film called One Got Fat, used to give me nightmares. Watch it here, and see if it doesn’t do the same for you! The swings out behind the school were excellent for jumping off, and I remember learning to square dance in gym class. We also played a version of dodgeball with small fleecy balls that looked rather like Tribbles. I remember a lot of the older kids making fun of President Carter’s brother Billy, but at the time, I had no idea why. 

All this to say: These days, people who oppose rigor in elementary academics seem to be of the opinion that it steals childhoods; I am of the opinion that nothing is more damaging to good old-fashioned common sense than the either-or fallacy. Clearly, you can have both. But scaffolding must start young; as a teacher I became borderline physically ill at constantly seeing a majority of 9th graders who didn’t know basic arithmetic, whose reading levels averaged around 4th to 5th grade, often who had never picked up a book they weren’t forced to, and who had never been asked to perform with anything remotely approaching rigor or integrity, especially in those settings where overly permissive administrators, school boards, and sometimes (and it pains me to say this) even classroom teachers would spew feel-good pabulum and politically-correct apologetic nonsense to justify their complete and continued failure to educate the children in their charge.

I am highly appreciative and grateful, in addition to nostalgic in the extreme, about my educational upbringing. I really want to share my memories of school because I think that much of what once was is now lost, and want others to think about the changes across generations. Today there is more glitz, better technology, a rapid pace of change and evolution that is exciting if you are a reader of Wired magazine, but not so much if you are a parent whose children are being made guinea pigs and subject to the yearly changing whims of the educational pundits du jour. I just want what’s best for my kids. And your kids.

Is that too much to ask?

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (1978-1982, fifth grade through junior high)

In fifth grade I was only in Mrs. Stoker’s class for a short while before a corporal punishment incident at the hands of a school administrator, detailed later in this article, impelled my mother, wisely, to pull me out (One of those bumps in the road I alluded to earlier... What was it that Billy Joel said? “You know, the good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems?”) and I transferred back to SUNY Cortland's Campus School from whence I came, a grade ahead of my old classmates. Fortunately, Mrs. Reagan’s class, the classroom in which I landed, was a multiage-grouped environment (a notion that over the past decade or more seems to have been largely abandoned), a blended grade 4-5-6 class, as were the other teachers’ rooms, and as we mixed freely, I saw some familiar faces.

The upper grades of the Campus School were dubbed the “Institute for Experimentation in Teacher Education,” or IETE, and it was truly unlike any school I had been at before, or since. Each week we were handed a blank grid, and were allowed to make our own schedules for the week (within a few basic parameters). Did I want three Art classes in a given day? Or three Home Economics classes? Extra math sessions? Or more reading? Industrial Arts? (4th, 5th and 6th graders using drill presses, band saws and jigsaws? I’m pretty sure that would not happen nowadays.) Much of the academic work was self-paced. Advancement was mastery-based. There was a lot of reading, but it too was self-paced. The room was comfortable, with lots of pillows and cushions for sitting and reading, and I recall it being divided into zones; it was not set up like a “regular” classroom. There was a zone where we would all sit on the floor in a circle and have powwows, discussions, about what I do not recall, although I do remember Mrs. Reagan teaching us to count using chismbop. And there was a very large and comfortable reading nook. I used to spend a fair amount of time there.

It sounds like a nightmare concatenation of exaggeratedly progressive clichés, but for me it was quite the opposite. Our teachers attended to our studies and kept us on track. We were encouraged to excel, and “good enough” was simply not good enough. The environment was such that the outer appearance may well have been that of a free-for-all, but there was enough structure to allow the classroom teachers to carefully monitor and choreograph the students’ intricate dance. I simply do not know if that type of environment would ever again be possible in a public school, and certainly not in the era of Common Core. To be fair, I have since read testimonials from other alumni of that strange little school who said the exact opposite - that their education essentially stalled, that they entered junior high school drastically behind, that the lag followed them for years. It may just have been for me, being well ahead of the curve, that the environment was nurturing, but for most students, that kind of loosey-goosey handling was damaging. I don't know.

Still, in Mr. Bover’s science class, when I expressed a desire to absent myself from the regular coursework that the rest of the fifth graders were doing, because I had recently discovered that in an adjacent room, he had a vaguely organized collection of rock and mineral samples – a whole wall of the room of shelves filled to overflowing with boxes and bags, some labeled, some not, of all kinds of wondrous stuff – he let me. He created an ad hoc geology curriculum for me, and I got to identify, sort classify, label, test and experiment with all manner of interesting rocks, ores, gemstones and fossils. I sat, every day (that I had science) in the side room, sometimes by myself, sometimes with my buddy Mike, and just... played with rocks. But with purpose, mind you. I’m fairly sure that no school would ever do something like that anymore, certainly not for a fifth grader.

But the real treat of fifth grade at IETE was a music teacher named Mrs. Springer. If I were to teach a music class to kids of that age, I would do it like Mrs. Springer did. We listened to and talked about classical music, and learned to identify pieces and composers. (FWIW, I actually do not like classical music, and I don't mean to suggest its superiority.) We both watched, and listened to the songs of, My Fair Lady and studied it, like a piece of literature in an English class. Naturally, we did all the traditional elementary school music class stuff. And of course, we sang!

Following a somewhat contentious divorce, remnants of my broken family headed north a half-hour to suburban Syracuse, and to Roxboro Road Middle School. I remember precious little about that year-and-a-half, for a variety of reasons, I suppose. I do remember my English teacher Mrs. Howard very well, however, for three things: 1. She had us read a creepy (at the time) short story called “Mr. Dexter’s Dragon”  ("Ope' not this book 'twixt dusk and dawn, lest ye let loose the Devil's spawn!"); 2. During a test, a kid next to me asked me for an answer. I whispered to him “I don’t know,” just to shut him up (I actually did know). She heard, and took both our papers and gave us zeroes. I was mad at her for a long time, but I understand, now; 3. She made us recite from memory the 23 common English helping verbs, in this order: “is am are was were be being been has have had do did does shall will should would may might must can could,” and timed us with a stopwatch. We had to do it in under ten seconds. (Most of us did it in under five. I did it in around two-and-a-half then. My best time ever is around 1.6 or 1.7. I have had students of all levels do this for years as a teacher, and two or three times I’ve had students break the 1.6 second mark – with clarity. I never could.) Of course, these days, not only is teaching grammar stigmatized, but having students do anything that smacks of rote is somehow become evil, where I would wave a magic wand and give real years of my life if I could just magically make students at all levels understand what principal parts of verbs are, or know their times tables, or know how to tell time on an analog dial by grade 9.

My homeroom had two or three TRS-80 Model I computers, on which I learned the rudiments of BASIC. The girl that sat behind me in homeroom, Annette, used to kick the back of my seat. I never wanted to turn around to tell her to stop because she was so cute I couldn’t bear to be cross with her. I also had a mild secret crush on a beautiful girl of Greek extraction named Alexandra in my math class. (I looked her up not long ago as I was preparing this essay; she’s a professor now at a nearby university.) 

At around this time, girls with feathered hair (and boys with feathered hair - somehow, I recall, the girls required entire cans of Aqua Net to get their hair to hold that shape, whereas the boys didn't. How is that possible?) were decorating their Trapper Keepers with the logos of both REO Speedwagon and AC/DC, an unlikely pairing, now that I look back. And the dirty, dirty girls who sat at the back of the school bus, bus number 211, came up with some very provocative alternative lyrics for Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” and used to sing them in unison, rather loudly, en route to school, much to the driver’s consternation.

MTV burst onto all of our television screens for the first time (which was especially appreciated as I was saddled with chicken pox), and I begged my mother for music, which she bought me (mostly on vinyl or 8-track): Journey’s Escape, REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity, Styx’s Paradise Theater, Hall and Oates’s Voices, The Police’s Ghost in the Machine. I began listening to FM radio instead of AM radio, and my current and still vital love for music was born.

Putting the pieces back together

In October or November of my seventh grade year, we bought a house, and moved to Liverpool, a neighboring community. I entered Chestnut Hill Middle School (CHMS), and the first of four years in the Liverpool public schools, in which I encountered a cast of characters of almost mythic stature. I can’t even begin to give them the kind of elaboration they deserve, but here’s a rundown.

Mrs. McGee, one of the school counselors, tutored me in Spanish. I had come from Roxboro several weeks into the school year, and I had been taking German with the delightful Frau Sonich. CHMS did not offer German, so I had to choose Spanish or French, as my mother would not allow me to default to a “study hall.” I chose Spanish, and Mrs. McGee tutored me every day at lunch for several weeks to get me completely caught up, even though I had arrived on campus some two months behind. I finished with an A, and eleven years later, became a high school Spanish teacher! 

Mr. Saladrigas was my Spanish teacher for both 7th and 8th grades. An older Cuban fellow with a dry sense of humor, he used to charge students five cents for every word in English that we spoke in class on our "Spanish-only Wednesdays." He saved the money in a jar, for class parties, though to be honest, I don’t remember us ever having one. One day, a classmate named Anthony went off on a frustrated tirade that cost him $1.35. Now, when I look at high school Spanish teachers giving their Spanish III and IV students worksheets off the internet, still reviewing basic “What’s your name? Where are you from?” conversation with their classes, and letting them speak English in class, I shudder. And I’m quite certain that collecting money from students for any reason would land a teacher on some form of suspension.

Ms. Gardner was my English teacher, well, “Language Arts” teacher, really (see here for my diatribe on the loss of Language Arts from “English Language Arts”) and she was tough. And mean, or so I thought. She worked us hard. We wrote a lot. She was utterly uncompromising. She emphasized grammar, correct sentences, clarity, spelling. Having her for two years in a row was bloody torture. The following year, 1984, Ms. Gardner, who had recently married one of the school’s math teachers, a fellow we all thought a little creepy, to be honest (and his thousand-yard-stare yearbook photo did not help matters), was killed by that very same man – two blasts with a shotgun as she was leaving choir practice at the local public library. Later on, when I realized how invaluable her relentless tutelage had been, further on, as I entered college, and even later still when I began my career as a teacher, I always felt conflicted about how I had regarded her. I was a kid, and kids are expected perhaps to despise their workhorse teachers, but when I teach, whether it’s high school or college Spanish, high school English, or college composition, she is one of those whom I channel.

Mr. Black was a Pavarottieqsue gentleman who taught seventh and eighth grade music and conducted the band, orchestra, and choir. When he would teach us a song, he would review each part – soprano, alto and tenor (there are no basses in seventh grade) – by singing it for us, in a timid, scratchy falsetto. His in-class voice was rather like a cross between Rod Stewart, Kim Carnes, and the bus driver lady from South Park. And for years, I thought that was his actual singing voice, and could not figure out why on earth he was a music teacher. Much later on, in tenth grade, when Liverpool High School’s concert chorale performed Bach’s Magnificat in D Major, Mr. Black guested as the tenor soloist for the amazing “Deposuit Potentes” (no, that's not him in the link) and showed me just how wrong I was. When I asked him afterward why he always held back in class, he responded very simply that in a room as small as our junior high choir practice room was, it would have been a bit much. Fair enough.

CHMS is also where I took my last Shop class. And my last Home Economics class – I sewed a whole track suit from patterns, and learned to cook various simple dishes. We had a cooking vocabulary list - 50 important recipe terms: cut, fold, clarify, saute, dice, mince, chop, braise, broil... It was actually useful stuff. It’s sad that, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, classes like this have gotten the axe. But I suppose courses that have no standardized tests as their endgame must have little value to administrators of most districts.

Again, I am highly appreciative and grateful and nostalgic in the extreme about my educational upbringing. I really want to share my memories of school because I think that much of what once was is now lost, and want others to think about the changes across generations. I know it's cliche as hell to suggest that one's own generation "had it best," and I'm trying to avoid that obvious trap. Nostalgia is not a de facto stamp of quality. But I think today's rat-race, standardized-test-based, data-driven culture is all about numbers, and NOT about students, and the uber-stupid notion that all students must go to a four-year college is preventing us from providing more well-rounded educations (starting at an appropriately young age) to that majority of students who are not destined for or desirous of a life of academia. Electives, arts, vocational ed - these are the first to get defunded, every single time. Such decisions are predicated on the notion of the standardized test score as the sole rubric of school "success." What a depressing, scary road we've taken many of our children down over this past generation. I just want what’s best for my kids. And your kids.

Is that too much to ask?

Bumps in the Road

If you are still reading this (impressive!), you may be under the impression that my schooling from pre-K through 8th grade was perfect. It wasn't, to the extent that few things are. (My first Rush concert was pretty perfect, as was a particular tortellini dish I savored on the shores of Lake Como once, but beyond that...) In elementary school, they still used the paddle - a big wooden one, with holes in it, presumably for faster swingability - a punishment I received once for mouthing the f-word to a classmate. My second time to the principal's office, he, apparently sick of seeing me twice in one year, lectured me sternly by grabbing me by the nose and shaking my head back and forth, leading to a bruise up the side of my nose that impelled my mother to remove me from the school for good, although why we didn't sue the school into the Stone Age is beyond me. Maybe it's not such a bad thing; these days, people sue for every little thing. Is it possible that we as a society were simply less retributive a generation or two ago?

In junior high, I was bullied, quite a bit actually. I had short, parted hair, like some 50s anachronism. I wore Toughskins instead of Levis, and occasionally - gasp! - cords. These were offenses worthy of a pummeling in Liverpool, New York in 1981-2, apparently. There was a particular cabal of boys on my bus who would get off at the same stop as I did, just to provide extra special door-to-door service. My stepfather's solution was to buy boxing gloves and try to train me up in our living room (ouch); my solution was more to ignore the pests and hope they'd go away, rather like some stinging wasp that just wants a fresh piece of meat. Eventually, they moved on to other things, I guess. It's just as well, I suppose. I was a bit of a wimp, and never was much good with the boxing gloves, but my stepdad did have guns, and those struck me as pretty easy to use.

Like I said, maybe we were all a little less retributive 40 years ago.

High School, Act One (1983-1985)

From there, I proceeded to Liverpool High School, where my run of memorable and wonderful teachers continued. Ms. Matthews taught 9th grade English. To this day, I still have “Annabel Lee” memorized, and Romeo and Juliet’s Act 3 Scene 1 will always be special for me, since I re-enacted Tybalt. Mr. Showden taught 9th grade history. I still remember his obsession, long before Avatar, with "Chinese mountains," those dramatic green and gray sawtooth shaped hills, and his having us read about the Asu tribe and their beloved Racs; I felt silly when it turned out that I did not immediately get the joke.  Read here and see if you do!

Mr. Zalewski taught geometry, and he taught it the old-fashioned way – lots of proofs and derivations, theorems and postulates, and constructions, constructions, constructions! We even read a novel – Flatland, by Edwin Abbott. It was hard, and occasionally boring, sometimes even unpleasant. But, despite not having studied geometry for 35 years, I can sit down any ninth or tenth grader and tutor that student in Geometry, so good was the level of instruction I received. What passes for geometry these days in some schools is shameful. (A school I taught at recently actually offered something they winkingly called “Geo-Lite,” which was listed as “Geometry” on the student’s transcript, but as actually an Algebra refresher course, designed specifically to get the students who had failed the State test, the New York State Algebra Regents Exam, to pass it. With a little geometry thrown in, you know, at the end, to justify the name. When all that matters is the test score, by hook or by crook, integrity becomes a punchline.)

Mrs. Nolan conducted the choir in 9th grade (with the assistance of a disconcertingly and distractingly beautiful student teacher). It was in her class that I discovered the band that was to become my all-time favorite. There had been a couple of pop hits from Chicago from the late 70s and early 80s on AM radio from time to time (“No Tell Lover,” “If You Leave Me Now,” “Baby What a Big Surprise,” “Love Me Tomorrow,” and of course “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”) but we performed a 5-song medley of Chicago’s older tunes – “Saturday in the Park,” “Beginnings,” “25 or 6 to 4,” “Just You n’ Me,” and I think the fifth was “Colour My World.” I had never heard these tunes before. I dug through some of my stepfather’s old 8-tracks and found a Chicago compilation of tunes from their first three albums (it appeared to be a bootleg 8-track, not an official release), and I listened. The first song was “Sing a Mean Tune, Kid,” the opening cut off their third album. 

Oh. My. Goodness. 

I was blown away by the jazz-fusion-rock driving sound, and became an instant convert. I never could draw Chicago’s logo very well, however, on my Trapper Keeper, or anywhere else really.

“Stumpy” Williams was my Earth Science teacher. Standing perhaps five-and-a-half feet tall, Mr. Williams was also the varsity wrestling coach. This was a surprising fact only until you actually got close to the man, and realized he was a fireplug – the musculature of a pitbull, but (thankfully) with the personality of a Tim Allen or a Ray Romano. And somehow, he managed to plow us through the 36 or 40 (or whatever the number was) required labs, teach us the entire course curriculum (none of this leaving out entire sections to hit only the high-frequency state test items like teachers nowadays are forced to do so their personal pass rates can look higher, so they don't get disciplined by administrators), and have a blast doing it. He had nicknames for almost everyone in the class; some were not so savory, and the net effect was to turn us into a cross between Snow White’s dwarves and Garbage Pail Kids. He used to ride a beat-up, old, red women’s 3-speed bike to school every day, and we taunted him mercilessly about it. But at the end of the year, we had secretly passed the hat around, and put in five dollars or so each (times two classes’ worth of students), and a couple of students cut class to go buy for him, and deliver to campus, a really nice, proper, bicycle. Seeing Stumpy tear up made many of us tear up as well. We celebrated the year on the day of the New York State Earth Science Regents Exam by – I do not remember who was responsible for this bounty – bringing two or three cans of vanilla frosting into the testing room, along with a package of plastic spoons. During the test, we passed the frosting around. Great teacher plus fun class plus sugar and trans fat (kiss off, Nurse Bloomberg) equals great memories. I got a 96 on the Regents.

Mrs. Stark taught Honors Spanish II. In my nearly two decades of Spanish teaching, it is she who most impacted me. She was mercenary in making sure we did not lapse into English in the classroom, but so outgoing, gregarious, fun and sweet that it didn’t matter. She was one of those few teachers where all of the students in the class strove to excel not because there was a grade to be earned, but because it was the right thing to do to honor and esteem such a wonderful person. I became a Spanish teacher largely because of her.

My tenth-grade English teacher, Mr. Bocchino, played much the same role in my becoming an English teacher. Using a massive American Literature textbook from Syracuse University (read my thoughts on high school ELA curricula once again here), Mr. Bocchino took us through Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, and Arthur Miller. He was unfailingly polite (of course, we gave him no reason not to be), calling us Mister, or Miss, plus our last name. To differentiate between a set of twin girls in the class, he decided that one was "cute" and the other was "adorable." (I wonder how long he'd have his job in the current climate with a comment like that, even meant innocently and sincerely as it was.) On top of our textbook work and our required major pieces (six or seven, including Billy Budd, The Red Badge of Courage, Huck Finn, and The Great Gatsby), Mr. Bocchino asked us to read a book every two weeks, and write a short report on it. I don’t know how he ever found time to read them, much less grade them. But I was inspired to find every great American author I could whose books were 200 or fewer pages or, and as a consequence, discovered the amazing John Steinbeck. In fact, I never had a teacher require a Steinbeck piece during high school (which makes my experience a bit unusual, I suppose) but in tenth grade, I must have read a dozen of them. Mr. Bocchino was also a rock guitarist, and had a basement recording studio. In the eighties, that pretty much made him a perfect human being. I remember him as a hell of a teacher. Of course, these days, he'd likely be skewered for teaching the canon, Heaven forfend.

Mrs. Eichenlaub made me write my first honest-to-goodness research paper for tenth-grade (world) history. To this day, when I teach research writing to college students, my recounting of how I performed the task with a non-electric typewriter and no internet is rather like Bilbo Baggins telling young Hobbits of his adventures (see time index 1:20 to 1:50 here), with much the same reaction. Someday soon I'll write about it; it deserves a post of its own.

Mr. Monteleone was a corpulent, jolly man – quite possibly manic, but absolutely delightful. His admonitions when we would playfully mock him in Spanish III were absolutely legendary. (“Spit in the wind, it’ll blow back in your face!” or “You better watch out, or when the test comes, you’re gonna shit bricks!” he would snap, not really angry or upset, and sounded – and looked – a bit like a cross between Dom DeLuise and Glenn Shadix. You don't know the name Glenn Shadix, but you know who he is...) I suspect that these days, a teacher who spoke of shitting anything would receive at the very least a stern reprimand.

And then there was Mr. Philips, 10th grade Algebra II/Trig, who told us that we had better, as if our lives depended on it, learn the quadratic formula. To show us that it could be done by anyone, he played a video recording of his son, then only two years old, reciting the formula (with a grand arm sweep for “aaaaaallllllll over two a!”) If he saw us in the hall, he would ask us. If he saw us on school grounds, he would ask us. If he saw us out at a restaurant, at the mall, at the movie theater: any time, any place was fair game. And if we couldn’t do it? Detention. I never earned such a detention, but I can only imagine it would have been downright Hogwartsian. I can only imagine now, if a teacher tried to pull that off, what a school administrator would say to mollify the screaming parents. To this day, three decades later, Mr. Philips still sends me birthday greetings.

I loved Liverpool High School; I actually felt a kind of partisan, almost cartoonish, pride. I even loved the school lunches: One dollar could get me a (mostly real meat) hamburger (30 cents), a hot dog (30 cents), a piece of pizza (30 cents) and a chocolate milk (9 cents). The school had seven choirs, and at least seven bands, including a rock ensemble and a full symphony orchestra. Our concert chorale, led by the inimitable Mr. Firenze, did a series of classical concerts – Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Magnificat. To blow off some steam, we held a fundraiser (we sold cases of imported citrus fruit from Texas), and funds were used to send the entire choir to Virginia Beach for a three-day vacation; we even had a hotel on the beach (I was on the 8th floor, with a balcony over the ocean!) I don’t remember if we gave a concert or not, but I do remember that en route, one of the two buses broke down and we had to all pile onto one luxury liner. It was standing room only, it was late, and we were behind schedule and tired as hell. But it didn’t matter. Once the fifty or so of us were all in one place, somewhat uncomfortably and possibly illegally, there was nothing else to do but sing. Which we did. A lot. 

One unique Liverpool tradition that, alas, has fallen by the wayside with changing curricular mores (and probably budgetary constraints as well): Spanish IV and V students collaborated to put on a full-length Spanish Musical each year. The budget was massive, and the course itself was largely the musical’s creation and production. Each year’s musical was a spoof of an existing property, a la Mel Brooks, but with a completely original script, songs, choreography, costumes and sets, all designed, composed, choreographed and performed by the students. In Spanish, of course. The performances were as good as any high school musical you could ever hope to see, with a Borges-esque touch of the surreal that put them over the top. For example, during Barrioeste (barrio = “ ‘hood,” oeste = “west”), when the Chorros (Jets) were about to square off against the Tiburones (Sharks), a student in full Superman getup was cabled across the sky like Cathy Rigby’s Peter Pan. For no reason at all.) The Spanish musical apparently did not survive past the early 1990s. I’m not sure why. I cannot say that I’m surprised, only disappointed. This is why we can't have nice things.

High School, Act Two (1985-1987)

On the last day of my sophomore year at Liverpool High School, some friends and I celebrated by turning all of the desks in our homeroom upside down. I’m not sure why, but at that age, it seemed an appropriate way to celebrate. For this, we were given detention, to be served the first available day that detention would next be held: Monday, September 9, 1985. The following school year. I never served the detention. That summer, my mother got a promotion, and she and my stepfather moved me and my sister to California. [Note: In 2008, I returned to Liverpool High School, and tracked down the teacher who had assigned the detention, a Mr. Ball. He was still working at the high school at that time. I apologized for “cutting” his detention, and a good laugh was had by all.]

Thankfully, my new school, Washington High School, was replete with the same kind of wonderful cast of characters that I had left behind. 

Mr. Ulrich’s chemistry experiments of making soap bubbles freeze, or dropping metallic sodium into water, were just about the coolest things many of us had ever seen. In my senior year, so enamored was I with chemistry that I was allowed to hang out, tinkering around in the lab, setting up and performing experiments independently from an old college-level Qualitative Analysis textbook. I even cleaned out, catalogued and organized the school’s chemical supply room. (I’m sure there must have been a good reason why there was an old glass jar with a corroded lid with a large charcoal-briquette-looking thing inside and a crackling yellowed label reading “Arsenic – 1969.”) Nowadays, I would imagine that liability issues would prevent any public school teacher from allowing a student that kind of freedom of access and experimentation. Besides, it is seems like it would be wholly against modern sensibilities to allow a precocious student to segregate him- or her- self from the collective; his/her expertise, insight, intelligence, and effort belong to all students, because, you know, sharing is caring. 

Mr. Mitchell was the choir conductor for both of my final two years of High School, and also the co-director of our 1986 musical Bells Are Ringing, in which I played five separate bit parts (including a singing Elvis-flavored walk-on that still gives me the shivers to think about). Mr. Mitchell’s style was a bit, shall we say, laissez-faire, but I had a great deal of fun (girls outnumbered boys in choir some 8 or 10 to 1 and I was finally at the age to really appreciate that). Plus, Mr. Mitchell never seemed to mind my sneaking into all the football games for free with the Marching Band by holding someone else’s instrument.

I wasn't initially in Mr. Wallach's U.S. History class; first, I was placed in the class of a Mr. Neely. I petitioned to leave the class after a few weeks. Why? So glad you asked... The first day of Mr. Neely's class, he spent the whole period talking about his vacation with his wife to Germany, and about how he had been to East Berlin (you young folks will have no idea what I'm talking about, I suppose). Turns out, he and his wife and answered "no" to the customs agents' question, "Are you bringing any American money into East Germany?" and, according to him, a search revealed some small change at the bottom of Mrs. Neely's purse, which precipitated a cruel and abusive three or four hours of detention and interrogation. This was why, he proudly intoned, we were going to say the Pledge of Allegiance EVERY DAY in his class, loudly and proudly, and we were going to be graded on how "proudly" we recited it. It was his way of striking back at those - direct quote here - "goddamn commie bastards." Each day, he would select one person at random to "lead the class in the Pledge." That person would recite up through "United States of America" alone, after which, the class would join in. The grade would be based on that first sentence. I knew I had to get the hell out (read my thoughts on the Pledge here), but before my transfer could be processed, I ended up getting selected. In what remains one of the saddest and most shameful moments of my life, I caved, and began a half-hearted recital (I still refused to say "under God," and didn't even mouth the words, but I'm sure Mr. Neely was too lost in ecstatic patriotic reverie to even notice). I got a C-. Where's a cilice when you need one? Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...

Mr. Wallach’s American History class was intense, but fascinating. Most of all, I remember Mr. Wallach’s final exam – it was a series of short essays: on the situation in Nicaragua. We had not talked about nor studied this then-current event. But he provided us with a quantity of background information, some articles to read, and then asked a series of questions that required us to repurpose and apply concepts we had learned from throughout the year’s American History lessons to the current situation, and analyze it through those critical lenses, comparing events in Nicaragua to events that marked our own history. It was a brilliant and innovative test, and one that would surely be roundly demonized now for testing a topic that wasn't specifically taught to. But it has become a model, conceptually, for many tests I have given, in whatever subject, throughout my teaching career.

Mr. Wallach himself was a riot. He used to show up to my English class on his prep period (I took English 12 Honors as an eleventh grader because the standard California English curriculum at that time was a year behind the standard New York English curriculum – their English 11 was American Literature, the New York State norm for English 10 at the time, but that's a matter for another blog) to show off his latest gaudy ties – twice as wide as any tie should be, and with color patterns worthy only of 1970s sofas and drapes. His appearances were welcome distractions. 

Not because English was a chore – quite the opposite, in fact. Mr. Fischer’s English 12 was an incredible class, and Mr. Fischer himself was rather like a hybrid of Robin Williams’s Good Will Hunting character and Mr. Kotter. We analyzed characters in Hamlet and Antigone using Kohlberg’s scale of morality (why, I have no idea), filmed short movies of the Canterbury Tales (my group landed the Physician’s Tale; I played the accompanying music – my group’s video was shot silent-picture style – on an even-then dated Casio keyboard), and a group of friends and I were allowed for a day to turn the class into the totalitarian world of 1984. I even prepared a batch of Victory Cookies (I swapped the quantities of sugar and salt in the recipe; the cookies ended up pretty foul) and Victory Ade (a standard batch of Kool-Aid, but without the requisite cup of sugar; don’t ever try this at home, kids.) The students were instructed to eat on command, after paying due homage to our version of Big Brother. One student in particular scarfed down his rather welcome-looking cookie, only to realize how wretched it was; the full cookie partially chewed, he could do little else but look up helplessly as the Snacktime Facilitation Guards insured his proper enjoyment. He quickly, but appropriately appreciatively, reached for his cup of red punch, quaffing the whole thing at a draught. His eyes told the story of the realization of the mistake he had made. Of course, he didn’t dare object, as we had cooked up punishments for rebels far more grisly than even Stanley Zimbardo could have imagined. (Perhaps I exaggerate slightly.) It was, as they say in those commercials, priceless. I’m sure that in the modern climate, something like this would be seen as too extreme, and the teacher would almost certainly get into trouble for allowing students to do this.

My 11th and 12th grade math teacher, Mrs. Dillemuth, was an absolute treasure. She would host holiday parties every year at her rather spacious home, with an open invitation to all of her current and former students. Her parties were well-attended, with guests stretching back several years. A picture of how dedicated Mrs. Dillemuth was: Towards the end of the summer of 1986, she tripped and fell on her front porch, breaking both of her arms. She refused to take time off, however, and when the school year began, there she was, in front of the class as always, with both of her arms in wrist-to-shoulder casts stretched out in front of her, zombie-style. She had arranged for an aide to be placed in her classroom to handle the writing of class notes on the board (which the aide did simultaneously with Mrs. Dillemuth’s lectures and discussions, in impressive fashion), the grading of papers and, well, anything else that required arms or hands that actually worked. She did this for five or six weeks until the casts came off. She just didn’t want to miss her students. I’ll claim a tiny fraction of the credit for that; there was a small crew of us who were juniors in her Pre-Calculus class in 1985-86 that were moving on to her Calculus class in 1986-87, and we were, if I do say so myself, pretty special.

Once, a calculus classmate and I were incredibly frustrated by a homework problem for which we just could not seem to reach the correct answer. I only recall that it took a full page of intermediate steps to reach our incorrect answer, and we could not find the error(s). I also remember, for some unfathomable reason, that it was problem #20. Strange, the things the mind clings to. We asked Mrs. Dillemuth if we could go to the back of the classroom, where there was a long chalkboard, and try to hash out the problem together. She graciously allowed us to do so, and the rest of the class proceeded as normal, while we were off in our little world, trying to get mathematically unstuck. I don’t remember how it ended, if we figured it out, or if Mrs. Dillemuth had to come help us after class. I just remember the feeling of - and I never could have expressed it this way then - being allowed to work unimpeded by the artificial strictures of the class period, and appreciation of our teacher recognizing the value of what she allowed us to do, even though it might have been contrary to whatever she had planned for us for the day. I wonder if teachers are even allowed that kind of autonomy anymore, or would dare exercise it if they were.

Mr. Miller, my physics teacher, had the annoying habit of answering a question with a question. Usually, it was some version of “Well, what does your group think?” It was perhaps this (and the fact that he drove an old Peugeot) that led me and 13 confederates to T.P. his house at two o’clock one morning. Mercilessly. We celebrated our coup at a Lyon’s restaurant nearby (similar to Denny’s, but with less tacky décor, Lyon’s offered free refills on orange juice, chocolate milk and hot cocoa, which Denny’s did not; sadly, the last Lyon’s closed forever, in Sacramento in 2012) until well past four, and thought ourselves the lords of all creation. Later on, much later on, when I became a teacher, I found the wisdom of Mr. Miller’s “annoying” ways, and now am proud to say that, as far as teachers go, I am more annoying than most. I wonder if there aren’t some parents complaining somewhere that there exists a teacher like Mr. Miller who makes their children think things out on their own instead of giving them the answers or rubber-stamp passing them. Mr. Miller is now a very busy and talented urban photographer in the U.K. Send some business his way by clicking here.

But Mr. Perlman, my twelfth-grade English teacher, gave me one of the most unforgettable experiences of my high school career. As I had taken English 12 as a junior, the school literally did not know what to do with me during my senior year; after all, I needed four years of high school English to graduate, and I had had, officially, but three. I ended up studying with Mr. Perlman on a self-paced, semi-independent-study basis. I had a small stack of major pieces to read, and we would meet once a week or so in his prep period, just the two of us, to discuss them. Up until that point, I had never really had the experience of having “scholarly” conversations in one-on-one fashion with an instructor. As advantageous as most educators will surely say large-group discussions are, and they are, no doubt, I found the level of focus and continuity – my ability to be able to explore one topic, one discussion, one angle, without a dozen other people raising their hands waiting to inject their two cents – delightful. I had always had positive relationships with (most of) my teachers, but Mr. Perlman’s was the one that actually crossed over into something like friendship, even though I was just 16 at the time. Seventeen years later, he attended, and even spoke at, my 2004 wedding. 

Epilogue

I have left out so many teachers in this waltz down Memory Lane, out of sheer necessity. But all this reminiscing has something resembling a purpose, in spite of all the meanderings: to contrast with, in cruelly high relief, the more depressing aspects of public education I have often seen as a teacher in the Standardized Test era. So much so that I left high school teaching for nearly a decade when Common Core caught on in 2011. Thankfully, I (having returned to high school teaching) am now teaching in a more responsive district and in a subject area where there aren't really any high-stakes standardized tests (Spanish), so I can focus on my students and my teaching. Yes, it is an extremely "progressive" place, even in some of the way(s) that used to drive me to distraction, and I'll admit that I don't always agree with the extent to which they operate in that regard, but I am older, mellower, and have more perspective now, and it is a very student-focused district in which I think I've found a good niche. 

And maybe if I'm lucky, someday some former student someday will write a long, wandering essay like this and my name will be in it. Just maybe.

Is that too much to ask?