The Sunday Memory Drawer: Junior High Teachers I Knew and Loved or Hated

And we go back to school.  This time to Mount Vernon's Washington Junior High School, which is where I endured the seventh and eighth grade. 

This was not a major upheaval to my life.  Washington was simply only five blocks further away from my elementary school.  And most of my Grimes friends were with me in junior high.  Along with a bunch of all new kids from other elementary schools on the south side of Mount Vernon.

There was power in numbers.  And we needed it.

The building above is not the school itself, but the cavernous auditorium where we held assemblies.  We were all getting older so the grade school flagwaving and storytelling we had at Grimes was not the ideal assembly entertainment for us now.  Instead, there were full flown musical productions.  There were three Black girls who used to mount the stage in some very inappropriate evening gowns and then lip sync to the Supremes. 

"Stop!  In the Name of Love!"

Yep, from twelve-year-olds.

Teacher-wise, Washington Junior High was more of a blur than Grimes.  Most made noteworthy but relatively brief impressions upon me.

There was our English teacher.  Mr. Copp who was probably ninety.  He had been teaching for so long that every day in his class was probably just as it had been for the past forty years.  He always wore a bowtie and looked like he was the leader of one of those barbershop quartets from the 1890s.  Indeed, he probably had been a leader of one of those barbershop quarters from the 1890s.

I pretty much aced my way through two years of Mr. Copp except for one memorable assignment.  As it had been for Mr. Copp over his likely seventy years of teaching, Wednesday was book report day.  You had a week to read one book.  Usually, this was a snap for me.  And I generally left it all for the Tuesday night before.

Except one Tuesday, the lights went out.  All over the east coast.  And I was stuck trying to do a book report by candlelight.  Actually, I was stuck watching my mother write my book report by candlelight.

In a two-year collections of "A+" book reports, that one earned me a "D."  Thanks, Mom.

When I challenged Mr. Copp on this, I pleaded the obvious.  How was I supposed to write a book report on Tuesday night when the lights were out?

"Well, Leonard, the lights were on Monday night."

Oh.

Our music class was taught by some tool named Mr. Ferraro and he looked like comedian Jerry Colonna without the moustache wax.  Mr. Ferraro gave us a rather healthy dose of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, which, in hindsight, would make more sense to me if I had realized there was no Mrs. Ferraro.

Mr. Ferraro also sought to give us some much-needed culture by arranging a field trip to a Wednesday matinee of "The Magic Flute."  Opera, we all sneered.  No worries, countered his big moustache.  We will learn all about the story for several weeks before we go.  We will hear all the music beforehand.

And we did.  Except that the day we actually went to the show, we discovered that Mr. Ferraro himself had not done his homework.

That performance of  "The Magic Flute" was done entirely in German.

What happens to a bunch of twelve-year-olds when they can't understand a word anybody is saying?  They remove the ink cartridge from their Bic Pens and start the biggest spitball fight Lincoln Center ever saw.

Mr. Ferraro never arranged another field trip again.

Yet, of all the junior high teachers we had, no one defined more the pain of those years than our homeroom teacher, Mr. Papps, who also guided us through science.

For the first year and part of the eighth grade, Mr. Papps was a model citizen.  A truly inspiring teacher in the vein of Lloyd Haynes' character on "Room 222."   The guy we all wanted on our side.  He was young.  He had a wife with two small kids.  He was one of us.

Suddenly and without warning, it all changed.  Seemingly over one weekend.

Mr. Papps was no longer Mr. Papps.  He had grown remote and sullen.  And downright unfriendly.  He was apparently done with us as students.  Instead, we became numberless and identityless soldiers in his army. 

Talking was forbidden unless you were asked to do so.  The slightest little movement was noticed.  We were turned into rigid statues as we sat at her little desks.

And then there was the end of each day.  No longer were we simply dismissed to scamper home.  Nope, we were marched to the front door.  Double file.  In lockstep with each other.  This might have been the Fourth Reich.

If one of us was a little out of sync or, God forbid, talking, we would be marched right back to the class and asked to do it all over again.  We'd get close to the front door and then Mr. Papps would notice some minute impropriety. 

"Everyone back to class!"

Groan!

Sometimes the simple process of leaving school for the day could take us up to two hours.  Other teachers would snicker at us in the hallway.  General MacArthur had apparently returned again.

More importantly, there was clearly something seriously wrong with Mr. Papps.

Now, if it had been today, parents would be up in arms over this inhumane treatment of school children.  Mr. Papps would be brought before the Principal or maybe even the Board of Education.  The guy wouldn't stand a chance up against the PTA.  And, since half the class was Black, we'd probably be supported by Al Sharpton. 

Back then, nothing happened.  Oh, all our parents knew what was going on with Mr. Papps.  But, to my knowledge, there was no great public outcry.   An unsolved mystery of my life.  Why not?

By the end of the eighth grade, we couldn't wait to graduate and finally escape Stalag Papps.  I remember one final conversation with the man when I got my last report card.  Mostly As.  And an "A+" in Science.  For one thirty second exchange, the Mr. Papps I remembered fondly had re-emerged. 

He didn't teach again after that eighth grade class.  About a year later, we read that Mr. Papps had died of some cancer. 

I wondered about that weekend where he had morphed into this evil storybook ogre.  Was that when he had learned his fate?  Is that when some doctor gave him the grim news?

Mr. Papps' passing explained everything.  And also nothing.

On to the high school years.

To be continued.

Dinner last night:  Mongolian Beef at the Panda Inn.