Good teachers, we need ’em

I was a crap-tastic student. Drove my eldest sister nuts. Usually scraping by with C’s and D’s, not because I didn’t understand the material, but because I was bored.
It bit me in the Eighth grade. Had a teacher (loosely defined in this description. He was the football coach and that was his passion, teaching was what he ‘had to do’ to keep that passion.), American History. Typical schedule in his class was this. Monday, Copy all the notes off the blackboard. Read accompanied chapter in text. Tuesday, finish reading study notes. Wednesday, Study notes. Practice quiz. Thursday, study notes, go back through chapter. Friday: Test.
No Lecture. No discussion. No TEACHING.
I skipped.
A lot.More so as the year progressed.
He never turned me in for the skipping, never said a thing, and that was the only reason I didn’t gripe about the class in general.
Even though I passed every test on Friday, He flunked me for attendance.
I had to repeat the year, no questions. The counselor for that school thought I couldn’t read and the only reason I passed the tests was that I was cheating.
Next year, I was placed in remedial reading class.For the life of me, I can not recall my Reading Teachers name, but I can tell you, she was the saving grace of the remaining public school career.
She didn’t take our counselors opinion for shit. While she didn’t state it publicly, after a few weeks in her course, I could tell she likely held the opinion that our counselor should have been a candidate for late term abortion. Because she didn’t trust that persons opinion for anything, (she would argue with them if they had said the sky was blue.) she tested every person sent her way. My reading score was for 3rd quarter sophomore college level. I knew I didn’t have a problem reading of course: the previous year I had read Clavells Shogun, Kings “The Stand”, started on Tolkien and finished many others long since forgotten.
She gave me an option. Return to History class: only one history teacher, already described. FUCK THAT! (and those may have been my exact words, but I don’t recall) or she would teach me typing and speed reading.Now, Our reading teacher was not a favorite teacher in our school. She was an older lady, only taught the one class a day, so she had her health insurance, and was a full time Dairy Farmer. She would start her day before light, and when she came in to school, more than a few times would have parfum du Cow lingering about her. She was tough as nails, opinionated, and old enough to get away with ‘less than perfect’ decorum.
I did have a reading list, after all she was teaching me speed reading, right? And some of those books on that list were well below my reading level, but they were books, while not outright banned, strongly ignored in most modern schools. Anything Orwell. Hesse Vonnegut. Abbey. If Claire Wolfe had been a regular writer then, She would have been on that list. ((Rand was on that list only the once, the majority of Rands writing would have exceeded our time in class. Sadly, it wasn’t until recent that I finished Atlas.)) See, she wasn’t JUST teaching me speed reading, or typing, She was teaching me to think about the crap around me. Her efforts to get me thinking were like little time bombs placed inside my head. I would go through the book, give my report. (I was timed in my read, the report was oral immediately after the last page.) and then given my typing assignment of the day (usually typing out tests for her other handful of students. This was before we had word processors, I was using an old IBM selectric, Blech!!!!) The next day, sometimes the next week, BOOM! That little bomb in my head went off, and I was tracking her down to talk about it.I recall the big bomb that went off in my head near the end of the year. The book was “A day in the life of Ivan Donisovich” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Does that name look familiar to you? It should.) Its a story about a Russian Political prisoner living in Gulag in Siberia. The story doesn’t point fingers at any one ideology, or belief, or anything, It’s written first person, about the trials of just getting through a work day laying brick for a new building while the temperature is minus twenty degress and the mortar keeps freezing. The struggle to keep warm enough to not lose fingers toes or tip of the nose, and finding food to help keep alive to do it all again tomorrow. ((Note, I have not picked that book up again in the thirty-seven years that have passed since. Yet I can still visualize some of the scenes as if I were standing there watching. ))
What wasn’t said in the book was the time bomb. And she knew it.
See, she was an East German Escapee. While she hadn’t seen the Gulag, She had seen the horrors of Communism, Socialism. She had witnessed as a child, the horrors of railcars loaded with ‘human waste’.
That was HER mission as a teacher. To try to cut the cancer out the world, one student at a time.I can never repay her, but I think she was more than satisfied with what she passed on to the ninth grade. My grades barely improved on average, except in one area. History. Oh the irony of that. I had another great teacher in my freshman year for history, one that firmly believed in discussion, using narrative in lectures, and did not insist on rote memorization of ‘on this date,,,’. I think he and my ormer reading teacher were good friends, though I may never know for certain. But that’s another story for a later date.(Pet pics have not a damned thing to do with the story 😁)