Truths My Teachers Told Me

      Of my junior year of high school classes, I've already mentioned recollections from Spanish One and Latin Three, and today I can lump most of my other classes, except for English, into one post.

      Physics was fun. I went into it thinking the material would be so difficult to understand – but it was not. The teacher, Mr. Hillaire, was young - eager to educate, excited about the material – still idealistic about his career, I guess – wonder how that all turned out for him years later? In the front of the class was a lab bench – taller than a desk, and longer. It was for hands-on demonstrating of physics concepts. One day Mr. Hillaire put his foot up on the lab bench to show us the goofy socks he was wearing. Kind of sad to realize after 45 years that visual is all that remains of my high school physics class.

      Trigonometry was a little trickier than physics, and that surprised me – had to apply myself a bit more than I was used to. Mrs. Prindeville was a thin young woman with blonde hair in a sixties beehive style. On first impression, one might think she was frail, but Mrs. Prindeville packed a whallup – one day she gave someone a knock on the head when he fell asleep with his face down on the desk!   

      Another time Mrs. Prindeville came by my desk after a test had been returned – she apparently liked me and told me there was one answer on my test that she could not read – it was illegible – but she gave me the benefit of the doubt that I had written the correct response. Mrs. Prindeville said that many kids use the technique of writing answers that could be interpreted in different ways because of illegibility – and she was onto their tricks – but since I didn't routinely do things that way, I had gotten credit that time. Wow – I totally should not have gotten credit for that. It was about four years later that I heard a college classmate utter that same philosophy – he purposely wrote sloppy so teachers might give him credit when an answer could not be read clearly!

      Social Studies junior year was American History – and the teacher was Mr. Shaw – an older man, very serious. His wife was my social studies teacher for ninth grade. I saw the two of them together one day one of the summers I worked in Chautauqua – they were walking down one of the quaint streets holding hands. Seeing any teacher at all in a place outside of school was eerie enough – but to see these two old married people being sweet with each other someplace so completely out of context was enough to send shivers down this teenager's spine!

      As usual, history class and I did not get along – and this particular class turned me off of American history altogether. In college, a lot of classmates took American history, and I could not be bothered with it – years later I regretted that decision and then years after that, when books like Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People's History of the United States came out, I reversed my regret and became disgusted with junior and high school social studies classes all over again, and I have been especially bitter about American history. But that is not to say I know any more about any of it these days!

     Grasping more understanding of American history is on my bucket list. Physics and Trigonometry? Not so much.

278 20151005 Truths My Teachers Told Me