The Sunday Memory Drawer - Elementary School Teachers I've Known and Loved or Hated

The movie "Waiting for Superman" got me thinking.  About some of the teachers in my life.  Those that inspired.  Those that annoyed.  Those that I wanted to bury alive in a toxic land fill.

The photo above is a portion of my elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.  The Grimes School.  Or what's left of it.  From the looks of it, this could also be Berlin in 1946.

This place was my educational institution from kindergarten to the sixth grade.  Except I was really there for one less year.  You see, I was in the first grade for only a month.

Mrs. Anderson, who later became Mrs. McKnight and I never knew why, was my first grade teacher and she singlehandedly changed my life forever.  Had it not been for her, I would have had a completely different set of friends.  I might have gone to a different college.  I might have even had a completely altered career path.

Mrs. Anderson/McKnight was the one who had me skip the first grade entirely. 

I hadn't been in her class for two weeks.  She had handed out a cartoon of a bird for all of us to color.  There was an elaborate poem underneath.  Mrs. Anderson/McKnight had gone out into the hall for a moment.  When she returned, she found me sitting on top of a desk and I was reading the poem to the other kids.

Her jaw dropped.  For me, this was nothing new.  After all, I had been reading the movie pages of the Daily News and the listings in the TV Guide for about two years now.  I thought nothing of reading out loud.  I used to regularly recite to my father what time the movie was playing at the Wakefield Theater.  Gee, didn't everybody?

Apparently not.  Mrs. Anderson/McKnight immediately grabbed my arm and took me down to the principal's office.  Crap, I thought...or whatever the first grade equivalent of that word is.  I hadn't done anything wrong.  Why did I have to go see Mr. Rider?

Mrs. Anderson/McKnight abruptly interrupted whatever meeting the principal was in.  She gave me a cue.

"Read that again."

Out came the poem about the bird nesting in the tree which I hadn't even been able to color yet.

Mr. Rider looked at me with amazement. 

My performances were not over for the day.  Later that afternoon, I was summoned again.  This time, my audience was some big shot from the Mt. Vernon Board of Education.  By now, I had the poem memorized.  I asked Mrs. Anderson/McKnight if she wanted me to recite it instead.  She pulled out another cartoon.  A goat.  Also with a poem.  I was being requested to do a cold reading.

"Read this."

No sweat.  Out came some rhyming dribble about a goat.

Following my curtain call for the principal's secretary, I was shuttled back to the safety of my fellow classmates.  As far as I was concerned, it was all over.

Little did I know.  Behind the scenes, there were many conversations.  Between Mrs. Anderson/McKnight and the school board.  With the other teachers in the school.  When my mother got called in, all bets were off.

Mrs. Anderson/McKnight was convinced that I could do second grade work now.  And, from what I later learned, she put up a huge fight.  They had not skipped a student in Grimes School for over fifty years.

I would be the first.

By October, I was headed to the second grade.  Kicking, screaming, and crying all the way down the hall to Mrs. Baron's schoolroom.  I was losing all the close friends I had just made.  I didn't want new ones.

But, new ones I got.  And they would be the kids that were with me all the way up through the eighth grade.

Then, there was my third grade teacher.  Mrs. Popper.  Fresh out of teacher college.  New to the game.  And an incredibly hot chick.  Or however a third grade student would describe a fine looking lady.

Other than her smoking hot legs, there are two things I remember distinctly about Mrs. Popper.  Inexplicably, our homework one night was to watch the Academy Awards.  Why?  Who knew?  Except the next day we spent an hour in class discussing who won, who lost, and whether the winning movie was really the best picture of the year.  We had never done anything so interesting in school yet.  This was not math or English or social studies.  My very first notion that learning, yes, could be fun.

One day, I had aced a test.  Mrs. Popper was particularly pleased with me and let my mother know when she came to pick me up after school.  Out on the playground, Mrs. Popper was telling my mom what a model student I was.  She was so enamored that she gave me a bear hug and then kissed me on the cheek.

You're kidding, right?? 

I blushed at the attention.  The shade of red darkened when I immediately realized that half my class had seen this display of affection.

"WHOA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I dreaded going back to school the next day.  I would be getting all sorts of shit about this.  In the middle of the night, I started to sweat profusely.  Was I that worked up?

No, I was coming down with chicken pox.  My next day back at school wouldn't happen for another two weeks.

And, then, there was another nagging thought.  It was the first time ever that a teacher had kissed me and I wound up with a disease.   During my nighttime prayers, I asked for God's help.

"Please don't let Mrs. Popper get the chicken pox, too."

My last year at the Grimes School would be the sixth grade.  In the picture above, our homeroom was on the first floor in the far left corner.  Our homeroom teacher was the art teacher, Miss Hartmann.  She looked just like Ann B. Davis from the "Brady Bunch."  A nice lady, but we soon discovered that there was no Sam the butcher as a love interest in her life. 

As kids will do, we'd often ask Miss Hartmann questions about what she did when she wasn't in school.  The answers were mysterious to us.  Miss Hartmann didn't seem to have anything going on in her life.  There was definitely no Mr. Hartmann and our teacher was certainly not the same hot thing that Mrs. Popper had been.

I asked my mother about it.  And then realized that the parents in my class had already done their share of chatter on the subject as well.

"Miss Hartmann probably won't ever have a husband."  My mother whispered the news to me.

Why not?

My mother pasued.  Ummmmmmmm.....

"Well, you know when we call somebody a 'sissy Mary.'"

Yeah, like that guy who works in the beauty salon?

"Well, Miss Hartmann is a lady but she's like that, too."

Oh.

Huh?  You mean she's a 'sissy Bob.'

My mother resorted to what my parents always did when an exchange with me started to get complicated.

"You ask way too many questions."

It was never discussed again.  Eventually, Miss Hartmann and the sixth grade was in our rear view mirror as we headed off for a new school year.  Five blocks away.  At Washington Junior High.

To be continued.

Dinner last night:  Sausage pizza at Boho.