My few good, and far rarer, great teachers are dead. O Captain! My Captain! Not once in recollection did I thank them for their effort on my behalf. Yet now I do reverence them and think of them with wistful regret. They gave so much and received, at least from me, so little in return.
I recall the many bad ones better. The majority by far. How humbling to sin in such a typically human way.
My good and great teachers eschewed sentiment in their teaching business. It was a necessary on going work for them to which they were evidently obsessively committed.
A wounded boy shielding behind false pride. Ensemble they did their best to patch me up and send me on. I think that like my parents they perceived that something bad had happened to me. Like my parents they didn’t allow the mystery to be my excuse.
I found fortune in the Concordia, Kansas schools of the 1950s. We lived there for almost seven years when my father was appointed by the bishop of Kansas to supervise 72 churches across north central Kansas, an area a good deal greater than Rhode Island. Concordia was a town of 7,000 in the dead zone of the Kansas-Nebraska border. No towns at all for 65 miles to the south, to the ‘city’ of Salina. Nothing but far flung and scattered villages to the east and west. And to the north stretched the even more lightly populated Nebraska prairie.
Inexplicably, at that time this island of Concordia had good schools, an oddity in a rolling ocean of semi barbaric land. One indication of how unusual Concordia was in what it offered its children is that it even had a youth orchestra in which I so wretchedly played violin, no Tartini I.
1. My teachers there were all maiden ladies beyond middle age. They did their work robotically after so many years in the classroom. One early on stood out however. Miss Dora Engel.
Miss Engel was more than beyond middle age. She was old. Also cranky and could be quite harsh. Her obsessions were my despair, phonetics and the most arcane points of English grammar, especially the schematic parsing of sentences. Miss Engel saw it her God given duty to shove her beloved specialties on a daily basis down the throat of every third grader who came her way.
I was hopeless with both. Every school day we were ordered one by one to the blackboard to stand alone with the snickers of classmates boiling our backs. There I stood blushing to my soul while stuttering and lisping inchoately my way along through declensions, endless sentence diagrams and phonetic renditions of multi syllabic words that I couldn’t even enunciate even though I alone in the class knew the meanings of all.
I would wait in horror throughout the day for her to call my name, in whatever subject. That meant standing at attention beside my desk with a “yes Miss Engel,” (yeth Misssth Eeengel) to answer her cruel onslaught of questions on the previous day’s homework. Yes Miss Engel, No Miss Engel. She did not rap knuckles as some teachers did, but she was a gray vixen of biting sarcasm that drove some children, never me, to tears.
My desk mate was Sharon Thrush, from a poor family. Miss Engel so terrified Sharon that sometimes when her name was called she’d sit pissing herself, weeping as the urine dripped to the floor.
How strange, most of us loved this martinet. And loved her on for years to come. A life time later I wonder why. I think it was because she really was a true teacher, and despite her guerrilla war on our ignorance we knew that however abrasively she loved us.
2. It was in Concordia where some anonymous–to me– angel sought to find help for my crown of thorns and cross to bear, my lisping and stuttering. When I was 10, and it seemed only for me, a graduate student in speech pathology at Kansas State University was found who would make the two hour drive to Concordia to work with me on Saturdays, for months, a morning and afternoon session.
To my great shame I don’t remember this young woman’s name. Something of a grave offence because if anyone gave me a greater gift I don’t know who it can have been. She is actually my most deserving teacher to honor, as long as I am me.
Looking back I see with more awareness that this cloud of unknowing that dropped over her face and name, anything about her, obviously had to do with my being molested. For with that came my ruined speech, and then came she as part of that. She and her lessons perhaps came too close to what hadn’t healed. Still has not healed. What then I was still too frightened to relate or explain.
I do recall that she had me work from the very beginning on speaking out the alphabet letter by letter. After that it seems that she had special words for working on stuttering, others for the lisping.
She had me work for a long time, I do recall well, trying to say my brother’s name, Steve. His name on my lips had been agony and for the rest of the family as well although neither of my parents showed dismay.
I wish I knew what method this graduate student used. But whatever, ‘whatever’ plus her wise and patient teaching, that young woman resurrected my speech. Her work has lasted for almost 60 years. My blessing on that young woman. Stuttering, lisping, those devils she vanquished except that oddly enough they come back now sometimes, when I try to speak French at which I am so miserable that it hardly makes any difference at all.
3. When 12 my teacher was Miss Niebergall. Kansas was settled by peoples from every part of Mattel Europe and Scandinavia, if mostly from Germany and Ukraine. She was an unorthodox soul probably pining away in our imagine less heartland. Riveting acne scars disfigured her face. You learned to ignore them.
She had us memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was she who read aloud to us the great English poets. She played records in class and introduced us to the music of Woody Guthrie and Odetta.
This is what Miss Neibergall told us one day when we were too acting too fresh– “I am not your friend. I am your teacher!” Unforgettable.
4. Mrs. Minnie Drowatsky. My Wichita high School, North, is a huge buff brick monument on the banks of The Little Arkansas river (river name pronounced R-Kansas in Kansas and Colorado where it is sourced in the Rockies). North stands as a monument to the enthusiasm of the 1920s, replete with images of our conquered enemies–Indians–sculpted high on its walls. Plus a tall, purely ornamental art deco-ish tower.
The inner courtyard held a small structure that was the school’s journalism department. There The North Star, North’s multi-page weekly newspaper, was produced. I worked on the paper my junior and senior years, rising to front page editor. The journalism teacher was Mrs. Drowatsky, a plump owl-faced woman in her early 60s who from the start looked very disapprovingly on me. She’d seen my feckless type.
I tried my charm . By then I tried it on all usually to good effect. Minnie? No way. She’d just give me her small sarcastic smile. I think she was the most jaded teacher I’ve had.
She was a harsh critic drilling us in the journalistic code of honor, having us study William Allen White, teaching the discipline of proofreading (which obviously from these posts I didn’t do well with). Minnie taught clean, simple writing (something else of which I was rebellious with my passion for word drunk and pretentious scribblings), the art of ‘counting’ headlines, of writing captions and the ultimate imperative of deadlines. She taught it all and well.
Through time I’ve recounted this two year emersion in journalism in a Wichita high school and seen a look of awe in my listeners. Even those with degrees from acclaimed J-schools. She really gave a one-of-a- kind teaching of the lowest grind jobs in publishing along with the highest standards of journalism. She taught everything in detail, and then turned it over to us.
The newspaper had won several national awards through the years. Without doubt it was the foremost student paper not just in Kansas but across the prairie. Rival high school newspapers were displayed in our journalism ‘house.’ As if to show us just how high she’d set the bar.
Her dislike of me peaked the last week of my senior year when I invited my friends to partake of cherry vodka in the morning, out front of North, in my old Desoto. We sat imbibing for a while until we almost couldn’t stand. Our bet was to then attend class and see who could make it the longest before being caught.
Journalism was my first-hour class. I didn’t last five minutes. Minnie took one look at me and marched me away to be expelled.
This led to another lesson in life. Only two of us were allowed to graduate with our class, me the scion of Dr. Mancil Bell a prominent clergyman, and a friend of mine whose father was the principal of another Wichita high School. I recall ranting at the unfairness of this ignoring my culpability as one chief plotter.
I felt betrayed by Mrs. Drowatsky. I did not say goodbye after graduation. I forgot her. That is until I moved to New York in my mid 20s to seek a great future. I found instead near starvation.
After submitting almost 200 applications, down to $40 and rent in arrears, I was finally hired by an international trade journal. This purely on the basis of what I’d learned from Minnie.
5. My last teacher in my Legion Of Honor has no more than a fragment of a name left in my head. I recall uncertainly that she was a ‘Pat.’ And diminutive she was, also wired tight, with febrile dew of on her brow. Darkly handsome she was, fiercely intense too, a true dark beauty and tightly armored against it. No friend she, neither love in her heart nor friendliness in her eyes. Great teacher, yes!
I hated her. I murdered her in my mind over and over. She drove me to tears. She was my Freshman Composition instructor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
For her part she had nothing but contempt for me, seeing me for what I was, a pretentious, feckless young man who had been told again and again how gifted I was. A talented writer, and more such bullshit. Seeing through to the truth that I was lazy and deluded by self grandeur. She knew I’d had never had anything demanded of me, never been whipped to perform my best. Just a big sneering baby. She also saw clearly the hatred I held for her. And didn’t care. Diminutive Pat. My Lady Of Writing.
When the first essay was returned I couldn’t look at until I was back in my dorm room. I dully expected to see her gushing remarks on my writing. Instead.
Mr. Bell, you obviously have no concept of how to write. This I nonsensical gibberish. Make an appointment to see me in my office.
I did, shaking in fury, and for an hour heard her shred my writing sentence by sentence.
“You will not write another essay for this class until you can show me you have learned how to write a sentence, and then how to construct a paragraph. You know this is a prerequisite course at SMU. You will not pass until I see that you have attained proficiency in the essentials of writing.”
I was devastated. Never before and very rarely since have I felt so badly used.
So my freshman year of English composition was spent in a one-to-one tutorial with Pat. Where Pat had me writing puerile sentences. Moving only in the second semester to teaching me to write paragraphs. I had no choice but to work hard for her or risk a tongue lashing. I did pass. Ultimately, the last week, she gave me an essay to write and when that came back she’d simply written ‘good’ on it.
I carried a grudge against her for years until finally seeing that what she’d taught me was what I most wanted, how to write. And that valuable I cherish above all next to my wife and children.