Books, Booze + Becoming an English Teacher
“I think great English teachers make the world go round.” - Taron Egerton
“There is plenty to be learned even from a bad teacher: what not to do, how not to be.” - J.K. Rowling
Image courtesy of Unsplash
High school for me was comprised of grades ten through twelve. Yeah, I know, it’s unheard of today and sounds like it was a century ago. Middle school didn't exist. Ninth graders stayed with seventh and eighth graders in junior high, and sixth graders were relegated to elementary school.
As a 10th grader, I was truly a freshman, the lowest on the food chain, basically a “bottom feeder.” The two things I remember about tenth grade are my first grade of C (in history) and my English teacher. Rick Moore coached basketball and taught a survey course of literature that I have never forgotten. We read classic short stories like “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. Coach Moore taught us how to write strong thesis statements and tightly structured essays, skills that paid off for me in 11th grade when my overzealous U.S. History teacher assigned a 35 page paper (and this was back in the day of typewriters and correction tape!). Every once in a while, Coach would roll in the TV/VCR cart and show us a movie. On those days, we thought Christmas had come early!
Coach Moore started me on the path to becoming an English teacher, but I didn’t know it yet.
It’s a good thing I had a solid foundation in English to prepare me for my junior year. My American Literature teacher, let’s call her Patricia Robinson, was no Rick Moore. She had been teaching about eleventy billion years and lived by the tenets of traditional teaching: recitation, memorization, and, well, fear. A tall, imposing woman, she meted out her no-nonsense approach to education with an iron fist.
At sixteen, I was intimidated when I entered her class because I knew her reputation. One of my good friends was in this class, as was a boy I dated on and off throughout high school. My priorities included impressing Mike and making Julie laugh as often as possible, but definitely not trying to understand the symbolism involved in canonical American literature.
As the first semester progressed, we started to detect that things were not entirely on the up and up with Ms. Robinson. First, I was skating through junior English, reading exactly zero books. High school me had no interest in reading Moby Dick (I tried later but still couldn’t find much to connect to) or The Scarlet Letter (I read this one much later and became a Nathaniel Hawthorne fan). I read Cliff’s Notes instead of the assigned texts, and, I hate to admit it, I still made As. (Sorry, Mom!)
A little later we noticed the red eyes. She couldn’t be that tired every single day, right? By that point, we started hearing other rumors -- innuendos that she kept some “brown liquor” in her bottom desk drawer that she added to her coffee mug.
And then one day she collapsed in the hallway. She reeked of alcohol, and Mike and his friend had to pick her up off the floor after she passed out during a class change. She kept her job, and I skated my way through the rest of junior English, never reading a single book.
I look back now without judgment, and I have nothing but empathy for whatever happened in Ms. Robinson’s life that drove her to addiction. My own life experiences have, ultimately, built that capacity within me. But in high school, I lacked the wisdom and maturity to see anything beyond a free pass to get away with as much as I could.
This was definitely not an auspicious beginning for a future English teacher.
In spite of the disaster that was junior English, I signed up for AP Literature my senior year. I really have no idea why I did it; no counselor had ever suggested anything like that to me, and my parents had not pushed me into it. Okay, to be honest, it was probably because my two best friends took it. Mabel Norton (commonly known as “Mabel the Tick”) was a far cry from Patricia Robinson. She wore all black almost every day, and she was a very round woman with black readers perched on the end of her nose. My class included 14 girls and one boy, and for about three months, we all thought she hated all of us.
Ms. Norton was also old school. But there would be no sliding by with her; Cliff’s Notes would not cut it in her class. And after looking at her summer reading assignment, I felt completely out of my element.
But she shepherded us through Thomas Hardy’s tearjerker Tess of the D’Urbervilles. She compassionately surveyed issues of race and discrimination with us in Shakespeare’s Othello. Ms. Norton chose Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree to help us see ourselves reflected in a locally set coming-of-age story.
We finally saw her smile at Christmas, and by then she was one of our favorite teachers ever. She was a lovely, brilliant woman, and I often wonder what happened to her after we graduated.
I took her AP Literature exam in the spring of 1988, and I made a 4 (enough to get college credit), even though I had never considered myself a strong writer before!
Something from her class must have taken root and bloomed many years later.
Image courtesy of Unsplash
I had other amazing teachers in my high school career, like my band directors, Mike Ryan and Dr. William Swor. Perhaps the strongest influences on my ultimate career choice were the Carols: Carol Etheridge and Carol Fears. Because of the mark they left on me, I dedicated my life to sharing their profession.
But the stories I studied with Ms. Norton stayed with me. I had to share them, so of course, I just had to teach them. I learned how to be an English teacher from the books and the booze.
