At a blog I follow, someone posted the names of several former teachers.
I was tempted, because I do remember all of their names--mine and my brother's. But I'm not quite old enough yet. Although those of my classmates who became teachers are retiring now, some of my teachers are still alive.
All teachers had nicknames. Most of these nicknames were just whatever look-or-sound-alike things suggested themselves to childish minds. Relatively few teachers made enough of an impression to earn really spiteful nicknames, and I know for sure that those of mine who were really hated are dead by now. So I suppose it might be safe to reminisce a little if I use their nicknames.
The point of my e-friend's post was that those who taught baby-boomers got away with lots of things that would get them barred from teaching, or visiting schools, or trading at stores across the street from the schools, now. Punishment was considered an effective teaching technique, because sometimes it was. Most elementary school teachers displayed "the paddle" of their choice at the front of the room and would whack somebody, in front of the rest of the class, during the course of every year. Verbal abuse occurred regularly. Kids were more likely to say more hateful things to other kids than teachers were, because teachers were supposed to show that they were thinking on a higher level, but teachers would tell kids what they thought was wrong with us, loudly and publicly. If they really hated a particular student, teachers might pitch into someone else and then let that person hear them say something nice about that student.
If they felt totally at a loss, teachers might ignore a student altogether. This was done after the "special" school was closed and most of the kids who were officially considered "retarded" joined regular classes with the rest of us. A boy in one of my classes didn't seem stupid to me, but apparently he had severe dyslexia or farsightedness or something. He came to school almost every day, sat down at the same desk every day he was there, and just sat there, not called on, not given test papers. I never saw him looking at a book or a piece of paper. He was strictly serving time in that classroom, like a convict, although so far as I knew all he'd ever done wrong was to have a learning disability the teachers didn't know how to deal with.
Peer tutoring was another teaching technique that some teachers thought was great. Meh. I was sometimes ordered to tutor somebody. "Be sure you don't do his assignment for him. Show her how to do the work." Bleep does an eight-year-old child know about how to do that? Most teachers limited peer tutoring to having students mark each other's homework papers, which undoubtedly reduced boredom and eyestrain for the teachers. It also gave smaller, cleverer little monsters a chance to get back at bigger, rougher ones. I enjoyed peer tutoring for that reason but I don't believe I ever taught anybody anything--except, of course, not to mess with nerds, which may have been the point, all along. Some teachers wouldn't even double-check the marks a student put on another student's papers.
People found ways to game the system. In grade three I was often ordered to "tutor" a boy who was spending the second of three legal years in grade three. He might have already spent an extra year in grade two, as well. He was big enough to have been in grade five, but it was a rare day when he answered any question correctly--if answers were written down and graded. We didn't have a lot of open discussions in grade three, but when we had them, he sounded as if he belonged in grade five. His rate of incorrect answers was so high that the only explanation was that he knew what the correct answers were, and was avoiding giving them. But why would anyone subject himself to that? It all became clear the year I went to college, when he joined the Junior Varsity team. JV was supposed to be for thirteen-year-olds, and he was eighteen. Home team fans loved him. He was the star quarterback all the way through high school. He was too old to be legally allowed to attend high school without paying tuition but nobody paid too much attention to that, especially in the case of the star quarterback.
Anyway, the teachers...I don't remember the substitute teachers. I didn't pay enough attention to most of them to know their names on the days when they were teaching. I do remember a few who filled in for the same teacher for a week or more, or were later offered full-time jobs.
And a note about titles: Teachers were called by titles. Women's titles had to be spelled either "Miss" or "Mrs.", although they were pronounced "Ms." (Nobody at the elementary school was a "Dr.") Janitors, librarians, and secretaries were also called by titles. High school students were called by titles in academic classes, though we could use given names in arts or trade school classes. Bus drivers, whether they were high school boys or grandfathers, were called by given names or nicknames. Cafeteria servers were called by the kind of food they dished out. If there was or had ever been any logic to these traditions, it was never explained to me.
Grade 1. For the first two years students were expected to be so tiny we weren't even required to walk down a corridor to the multi-user restrooms. To keep us out of the way of bigger kids, there were single-user restrooms in each classroom. So we had only one teacher to put up with, all day long, except for the music teacher who visited once a month. Mrs. Fatso was most memorable for locking horns with my Indiana-raised mother about my alleged Northern accent. Mrs. Fatso was from Georgia so her accent might have been rated even lower in status than a Northern one, by some people. Mother "won" an argument with her and I don't think Mrs. Fatso ever forgave me. She was one of the less abusive teachers but she never missed a chance to find fault with anything I did.
I will say, to Mrs. Fatso's credit, that she was the only teacher I ever had who never sent in a substitute. Every day when I was in that room, she was there too.
Also, Miss Music. "Musick" is a local family's real name, but "Music" was the nickname for the visiting music teacher, every year. The one who visited during my first year was young and pretty and nice, the daughter or granddaughter of one of the middle school teachers. She didn't give out grades but just led sing-alongs. Who could have not liked her?
Also, for one and a half marking periods, my grandmother, Texas Ruby, who had also done a teacher training course though I'm not sure whether she was ever employed as a full-time teacher. She married young. Anyway she made sure my education was not neglected while we spent the winter in Florida. Aunt Dotty would later let us be vacationers in peace, but Grandmother had me working ahead of grade two before I went back to grade one.
Grade 2. Mrs. Ratfink really hated that I'd learned to write cursive from Grandmother and spent a good part of the year we were officially supposed to start writing cursive finding fault with the way I'd learned to make every....single...letter. Grandmother hadn't taught me to put enough of a flourish on the ends of lower-case letters like "e" at the end of a word. I am not making this up. Mrs. Ratfink thought her mission in life was to correct students of being too intelligent by making sure we went back and re-learned everything in her way. It did not help matters that this was the year my "celiac disease" started to kick in. I had some sort of cold-and-flu symptom all winter long and stayed home until Mrs. Ratfink warned Mother that if I missed another day I'd have to repeat the year. My favorite part of that whole year was spending two weeks in quarantine with mumps. I didn't feel any pain from mumps, didn't mind if I looked a little worse than usual, was glad of a two-week vacation from Mrs. Ratfink's company, and, on top of everything else, some relatives sent us a tame bantam hen with baby chicks to distract my brother and me from the boredom. Lovely.
Also, Mr. Music. He was an older man who brought the wonders of new technology to the public schools, meaning that he brought tape recorders in and made recordings of our sing-alongs, which would later be broadcast on local radio and used to lead subsequent classes' sing-alongs.
Grade 3. Mrs. Moose wasn't all that big. I don't remember her being fat enough to have gallbladder surgery, but she did, that year. She had long golden blonde hair with black roots and heavy black eyebrows, which I thought made her look sort of mean, but most of the time I liked her. She let me read chapter books after doing all the homework assignments in class. She also added sing-alongs to the visits from Mr. Music, whose hours and salary were under review.
Also: Mr. Smarter. He read John Holt and did open discussions. Unfortunately we didn't have him for most of the time Mrs. Moose was recovering from surgery.
Also: Mrs. Failing. She was easy to hate.
Also: Horrible Hornrims. She was even easier.
Grade 4. This was the year Dad taught a trade school course in Sacramento, so we lived out there all year. Grade four still counted as primary school in the neighborhood where we rented half of a duplex house. Kids could walk to and from school--it was one of those suburban neighborhoods Boomers reminisce about--and even walk home for lunch. The school was well funded, with all kinds of sports and playground equipment, and the school even provided books, pencils, and paper, but it didn't have a library. What it had were bullies. This was the year I would still have to say that sending me to that school, which adults thought was an excellent one, qualified as child abuse. Even in grade four kids would make ourselves sick rather than go into the group bathrooms. Enough harassment, if seldom real beatings-up, took place on the playground and in the cafeteria. I thought I was the most despised and persecuted of the victims but, from an adult perspective, I think a few others may have had a worse time even than I had. One girl was picked on for half a day, went home, and never came back.
Homeroom teacher: Mr. Ed., who would probably have been banned from teaching today due to political incorrectness and verbal abusiveness, and was frankly incompetent to teach most subjects, but he did teach all of us all the math we'd need in elementary school or, probably, in adult life.
Reading was taught by a different one of the three fourth grade teachers for one third of the year. The other two were women. I liked both of them better than Mr. Ed. Mrs. Gooey was the old, grim, Slavic one who threatened to knock two boys' heads together if they didn't stop fighting, so they did. Mrs. Snorkeldorf was the one who immersed her homeroom in The Phantom Tollbooth.
Grade 5. Dad was not asked to teach again. Mother got my brother and me into the Seventh-Day Adventist school, which might have been nice if it had had a bus or a car pool to haul us across the city, but it didn't. Going to school there meant we had to move to Southgate, which, as anyone who knows anything about Sacramento will remember, was a terrible neighborhood. Among other things some older kids, who were Black, knocked my brother off his bicycle and whacked him with picket signs for supporting the protest they were doing. It was September, so they thought we were Mexican. They might have shown even more hate if they'd realized we were legally White.
Anyway, my teacher there was Mr. Tall, one of the few of his generation who were taller than Dad. He wasn't a great teacher but he didn't rely on verbal abuse, and did have a well-filled bookshelf at the back of the room. My brother's teacher didn't have a nickname so far as we knew, because this was a church school. She wasn't great, either, but my brother developed the ability to read large print for short amounts of time in that season, so she claimed the credit for teaching him to read. Grades five through eight also had formal classes in church music taught by the headmaster, who didn't have a nickname either.
Then we inherited the house later to be known as the Cat Sanctuary and moved back home. The principal didn't like us so, right away, I was assigned to the homeroom of Ms. Gooseneck, a.k.a. Old Miss Mean and some other nicknames that were even worse. Everyone really hated her. One way to spot a Boomer in my town was that we all remember her as The. Worst. Teacher. Ever.
In the case of Old Miss Mean ugliness and spitefulness probably were connected--by untreated diabetes. When glaring with special hostility at students she tended to stick out her goitred neck and throw back her head with the chronic scowl on her face. She was hardly five feet tall when she started teaching, and shrank with age. She was flabby. Sometimes she'd take a notion to get fit and order everyone to do calisthenics on the paved parking lot that was what we had for a playground, and everyone would show off how much better they could do all the exercises than she could. Most of us were stronger and faster than she was. Some were taller, and Miss Mean seemed particularly hostile to them.
She had a classroom rule that seemed as if it would be strictly fair. Everyone in turn, except the "retarded" boy she pretended wasn't in the room all year, was called on to answer questions and demonstrate math problems, going up and down the rows in strict order all morning. That by itself wouldn't have been so bad, although now it's considered emotionally abusive because a student might have to be corrected in front of the class. Hah. Old Miss Mean 's idea of correcting a math or spelling mistake was not just something like saying "No, three fives are fifteen." Punishment for wrong answers seemed to be her favorite part of her job. She was not above dragging a student's personal habits, known or imagined, or family into the verbal abuse. The worst part of grade five was when Miss Mean finally said something nice about me--in front of the class. For the next six weeks everyone hated me, and it was a very brave cousin who spoke to me in a friendly way at school, on a Monday, after we'd shared a particularly enjoyable weekend.
But the closest Old Miss Mean came to physical abuse, in my year with her, was the day the girl with lovely long blonde hair pleaded that she was feeling too sick to demonstrate a math problem. On went the verbal abuse machine that was Old Miss Mean. "Everyone else is sick of showing their stupidity too. Get up there and do the best you can." So the blonde, whose hair had never been cut and hung down to her waist, went up to the chalkboard, wrote sloppy numbers with a trembling hand--Miss Mean commenting all the way--turned around to explain what she was demonstrating, and was sick. Her breakfast dripped through her beautiful hair. "So, you really are sick. You didn't have to come to school and make everyone else sick too! Go to the nurse's office." Miss Mean made it sound like punishment. When the blonde came back to school a week or two later (it had been swine flu) her hair was short and she was so traumatized that you could induce visible sweat and tremors by looking at her sidewise. I knew this because I was one of the little monsters who did look at her sidewise. She'd try to be brave, saying nasty things that egged me on to repeat the treatment, but in a few minutes tears would well up in her blue eyes. And then the teachers in their wisdom made her repeat grade five, spending another year with Miss Mean as math teacher, only in a different home room. I am not making this up.
If that blonde is still alive somewhere...I thought of most of the hostility I dispensed so freely in school as self-defense, and it probably did protect me from having a worse time than I had and I wouldn't blame or punish a child for doing it today, but the way I tormented you was pure cruelty. It was one of the sins I had to repent of when, as a "cradle Christian," I made my personal commitment to be a Christian adult. I've regretted it for fifty years.
Anyway: In the middle grades each class had four teachers and each specialized in one major subject, Math, English, Science, and History. Grade five spent the first half of each day doing reading, writing, spelling, and their homeroom teacher's major subject, and the second half rotating among the other three teachers.
So: Mrs. Brick, who taught science. She was a good teacher. She had all of us drawing diagrams of the inner structures of eyes and ears, synthesizing peat and knowing in theory how to refine a dog dropping into a very small diamond. People who still enjoyed learning and thinking loved her. I did.
Mrs. Smelly, whom I never noticed as smelling worse than other people but who did have a tempting name, taught English. The other possible nickname to go with her name didn't fit; that year, she had a waist but no other visible curves. Next year, as if to prove something, she quit teaching and had a baby. She had no particular talent for teaching and I didn't like her, but she did stock the whole collection of Scholastic paperbacks for the middle grades and spend enough time reviewing things with slow learners to give me a chance to read them all.
Mrs. Snodgrass--you can guess what her nickname was, she's been dead long enough that there's no real need to use it, and this web site wouldn't display it anyway--taught history. She liked history and geography. The school board made everyone carry around big clunky "social studies" books that didn't teach us much of anything, and for most of the year Mrs. Snodgrass ignored them and drilled us on the facts of history and geography. Peace to her ashes, she defined the facts as including our short answers to the question "Why did the South have better soldiers and officers?" in the chapter on the Civil War, but they also included the dates of important inventions, the names of all the Presidents, and the capital cities of all the States. She even found time to get into a few of the "social studies" issues, such as its being legal to belong to a labor union (and she did), how landlords might balance profitability with decent housing conditions, and how none of us had psychic powers because we couldn't even guess what she was thinking by gazing into her eyes. Not everyone liked her but I did. One of Ogden Nash's more memorable "Nasheries" divided humanity into "Swozzlers" who were greedy and wasteful and "Snodgrasses" who were nice and respectful of others. It always seemed to fit her.
This was the year the school board decided the middle grades could do without Mr. Music. He was still in town but the "enrichment program" the board had voted to use didn't have room for him. It was "enrichment" for most of us to cover up the "remedial" classes some of us had been found to need. I followed the kid ahead of me to Mrs. Brick's room for remedial reading for a month or so before anyone officially noticed me doing this and said "Oh no, you must go to Mrs. Smelly's room for enrichment." I enjoyed remedial reading more than enrichment, though both classes featured a lot of self-chosen reading with shiny new paperback books. Well...in enrichment the selection did include The House of Dies Drear, the most challenging and therefore enjoyable book I'd ever been allowed to read at school.
Grade 6. Mrs. Dunce really did have some sort of neurological issues, and died young. She might have been classified as a high-functioning autistic patient if she'd been born later. She would have noticed me because Mother packed either peanut butter or fish sandwiches every day, and Mrs. Dunce had reactions to the mere smell of peanuts. She didn't like fish, either, but she leaned back and fanned away the odor of peanuts.
Anyway she started the year trying to kill me with kindness. Among other things she offered to buy me a poster. I didn't want to hang a poster on my wall where it would soon show smoke damage in a wood-heated house, but thought I could keep a notebook-sized one in my notebook, so I chose a notebook-sized poster. "Oh, if you want the small size, you may have two!" So I chose another poster. The posters were meant to introduce art appreciation into a grade where none of the teachers felt qualified to teach "drawing" as required by law; they were prints of photos of famous paintings. The two I chose were of horses. I figured my brother could have one, and I could have one, to paste into the backs of our notebooks and enjoy looking at or copying for a few years. But then for a surprise Mrs. Dunce changed the order to two wall-sized posters. And scolded me, at length, in front of everybody, for not being grateful for this wonderful improvement over what I had actually wanted. For the rest of that year, I'd gone from being her favorite to being her least favorite, and everyone knew.
Mr. Music was restored to the middle school that year, but grades five through eight had a brass band, for those who chose to join. In grade six I wanted to join the band and was issued a French horn and had something to do with the time in between arriving at school and being admitted to the classroom in the morning. I thoroughly enjoyed the band and liked the teacher. Everyone else in my family hated the sound of a brass band, but Mother said the family had to put up with it because playing a brass instrument might help push my front teeth in a little way. They were beyond the orthodontist's hope. What correction they got, which wasn't much, they got from the French horn (and from the early removal of the cuspids, which really did grow in like vampire fangs).
Mr. Gopher taught science. I was never sure whether he had a speech impediment or just thought sounding a bit tongue-tied was trendy and London-esque. I disliked him. It was mutual; he sent home my very first failing grade and my parents made sure I wrote out the answers to his boring "study questions," after that, though as a protest against their inanity I was allowed to use my typewriter and make my snarky answers easy to read. I don't think Mr. Gopher actually read the answers. I think he just looked for some minimum amount of verbiage as a basis for grades.
Coach Smith, whose given name was Gilbert so non-athletes called him Mr. Filbert or Mr. Nut, taught "social studies" from the lame-brained book. I don't suppose it did anyone any harm since we'd already learned the basic facts of US history and geography as they were taught at the time, but it might have been worthwhile to have learned something about the history and geography of the rest of the world. I don't think even Coach Smith cared anything about the worthless contents of the social studies book, though they did include a chapter on the value of formal education in preserving Jewish culture to which he seemed to be paying attention enough to give me peculiar "Have you anything to add?" looks throughout that week. His heart was in coaching JV football. He was indisputably good at that.
Mrs. Staplegun walked us through a review of the math concepts I'd learned from Mr. Ed. and others had been traumatized about by Miss Mean. I remember her class as supremely boring but recognized that most kids seemed to need it. She was there to mop up emotional mess. Sometimes if everyone paid attention and got through the lesson Mrs. Staplegun, who had been a bit of a singer, would sing popular songs to us. Her favorite song, that year, was "Delta Dawn." Parents might not have approved of this choice to entertain grade six, but it was more fun than math.
Mr. Music came back that year and led monthly sing-alongs, having added a transparency projector to his cartload of tapes and tape recorder. Middle grades got to sing along with popular hits instead of Sam Hinton and The Baby-Sitters. The list of songs I learned at school included "Country Roads," "Lonely Teardrops," and "Let Your Love Flow."
Secondhand: My brother's teachers: Grade 1. Mrs. Snickers. Her daughter was in my class. Neither of us disliked Mrs. Snickers.
Grade 2. Mrs. Yoicks. I had remembered her as "the pretty one" before the school hired Ms. Linda, but by the time my brother came along she'd already become frumpy. She hadn't been teaching long enough to be really tired of it. Neither of us disliked her either.
Grade 3. Miss Window. Grade three had two teachers whose given name was Linda. The one who looked Cherokee was beautiful, popular, and fun, if she did model herself a bit on Buffy Sainte-Marie. My brother got the one who looked White. She was a snippy young thing neither of us liked. "Window" was short for "Do you hate your teacher, dear? Then throw her out the window." She didn't teach long; she latched onto the son of an old friend of Dad's, and no child had to put up with her any more, except that I caught a sort of parting blast--"She asked if you wanted some clothes she'd worn, but they looked too small. What a tiny waist she has." Right. Miss Window was the sort of girl who would make a point of calling a teenaged girl's attention to her having a tiny tapered waist.
Grade 4. Mrs. Potatoes. My brother didn't think much of her, but didn't really hate her either.
Also: Mrs. Whackem. In grade one my brother's commitment to nonviolence was revised and amended by a distant cousin, a hulking repeater who, I reported at home, was at least as tall as I was and quite a bit heavier. He endured some punches and kicks until the day Big Billy the Bully and his little henchboy decided to give my brother a swirly. They had used the toilet first. My brother didn't think they were really going to risk dunking his head in it until it happened. Then he rose up dripping, kicked the smaller boy out of the bathroom, dunked Billy, and had made a good start on mopping the bathroom with him when the teacher walked in. Later Big Billy grew up, joined the police force, and went on record as saying that my brother had taught him about respect for others.
But not enough, because later, during Big Billy's second year in grade two, my brother caught him bullying a closer relative, Tiny Tiresome Timmy. My parents didn't have a telephone--even the old durable ones didn't work well enough to be worth paying for--so Mrs. Whackem vented her agitation to me in the cafeteria. "Your brother beat up a second grade boy."
"Why? Which one? What did the second-grader do?"
"Well, it was Big Billy. Apparently there's an old grudge..."
"Oh, well, that second-grader. He's older than he is and bigger than I am."
"But he is handicapped! He's not bright!" wailed Mrs. Whackem.
Neither of us ever had any respect for her, ever again. Nor did our parents. Beating up Big Billy the Bully was the sort of thing for which boys get told, "Brawling is a very bad habit," and given new bicycles.
Also: Ms. Pain. I didn't hear much about her.
Also: Mrs. Ungodly. Mother used to say "Nobody deserves a nickname like that." Grade four thought she did. She and Mrs. Whackem looked a bit alike--young, slim, with short black hair--and memory tends to conflate them. For the first half of the year my brother said that at least they were easy to look at. For the second half he despised them.
Grade 5. My brother was also assigned to Old Miss Mean's homeroom. He said that by that time she was really sick, and her outbursts of bad temper often escalated into violence. There was a fad for wearing rotten cotton shirts to school; Miss Mean reportedly tore boys' shirts to get their attention. Sometimes, he said, she grabbed students by their hair. On the first day of school, he said, she kicked the biggest boy in the class in the shins. My brother was only the second or third biggest, but he was still taller than Old Miss Mean, and he still reminded her of me.
So, one day the janitor cleaned the floor while everyone was out to lunch. Finding somebody's homework paper on the floor, he placed the paper on the nearest freshly polished desk. My brother came in and found this paper on his desk. "He got all the answers wrong and he hadn't even signed his name, whoever it was. I wouldn't have wanted to sign my name to that paper either. So then Joe Blow said it was his, and Miss Mean says I was copying Blow's paper."
Another day some of the boys were scuffling. My brother didn't say he'd picked up his math book to hit someone with, but that seems the most likely reason why another little brat grabbed his math book and threw it out the window. The roof of the school office projected out below Miss Mean's window, flat, tarred, with puddles here and there. "If I hadn't had this cold I would've thrown him out the window after it. In came Miss Mean and said, "You threw your book out there! You climb out and get it!" I said, "John Doe threw it. Make him get it." So they're not going to let me borrow books from the school any more." Climbing out on the roof was perfectly safe, though my brother suffered from vertigo, but he did have a cold and it was a cold, wet day with a lot of water on the roof.
The kids went on strike and refused to do homework or study, hoping to get Miss Mean fired. It didn't work. It was a difficult year for everybody.
Also: The Brick. My brother liked her too. She was a class act. She stayed out of students' personal concerns and stuck to science facts.
Also: Mrs. Newby. Nobody liked her.
Also: Mr. Smarter was hired as a full-time teacher that year. Grade five adored him.
Grade 6. As a result of having led the strike against Miss Mean my brother was assigned to Coach Smith's Special Class for Problem Boys, which he'd been warned was going to feature severe discipline and football. Coach Smith saw my brother as a quarterback for a year or two. My brother saw himself as a runner--a cross-country runner, not somebody who was going to have to spend the year either running and hiding from, or being beaten up by, or having to learn to fight with, real juvenile delinquents who carried knives.
So instead he was enrolled in a tiny, not really legal, Baptist school program where his teacher was a church lady I'll call Mrs. Hassle. I don't know that she actually taught anything. I think what she did was check homework papers, the way schools use computers to do now. My brother did well, though, because he was allowed to do independent study after rushing through the homework papers. He made studies of several subjects that were well covered in books at the public library, and did projects, genetic experiments with plants, tutoring, recycling...he had a great year. But all Mrs. Hassle did was step out of his way.
This is long enough for a blog post. Memories of junior high and high school teachers will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that although "brick" used to be a slang word for a thoroughly decent human being, and I think the Brick was one, the best teachers I had were my parents. Most of the learning I did, as a child, I did at home, more or less in spite of school.
I think elementary school did me more harm than good. Dad blamed the virus-laden air for making me unathletic; as a celiac I think that would have happened if homeschooling had been legal in my time. Then again, although I didn't take correction particularly well, I wasn't cruel at home. I'm pretty sure that, if Miss Mean hadn't chosen to subject me to another six weeks of feeling like the most despised and persecuted person on Earth, I wouldn't have found it entertaining to torment a wretched child who probably felt sick when people looked at her for years after grade five...and she was the sort of girl people always had looked at, and always would, which probably made things even worse.
I've often thought that most of my generation's "emotional problems" had less to do with abuse in early childhood (though many of us were at least neglected in early childhood) than with the trauma of being packed together into public schools. Some people may have found some relief in group therapy where they all pretended they'd been abused by family members in early childhood as an excuse for having "emotional problems." I never did. I didn't choose psychology as a major in search of "help for my problems," because psychology, at that time, was not offering any; I knew that because I knew I had problems--with behavior patterns I'd learned at school. Growing up helped. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense helped. Psychology that focussed on emotions was something I learned quickly and easily, and was able to use to help other people, but it had little to offer me. But my early adult years were still a crash course in unlearning the unhelpful mental attitudes and language habits I learned at school.
I think I feel inclined to mention this because, back in my home town, I know so many people who learned the same bad habits at the same school. They have not lived in a big city and had to work their way out of learned behavior patterns that express hostility, or out of the perception that hostility needs to be expressed, in order to pay the rent. Ooey-gooey, emotion-focussed psychology does not appeal to them and wouldn't help them if it did. Admitting that they may indeed be expressing more hostility than they even feel because they learned the importance of scoring off and putting down, at school, is what might help them. Though of course they can say "Well I'm retired now, and I don't plan to talk to a lot of tourists, and the people I talk to are used to the way I talk," and that's true. All they'd gain by learning to feel and express sincere good will, primarily as the kind of respect that may mean not saying much at all, is that I or someone like me might enjoy their company. "So why bother? I am or have been married, I have children, I have parents--I don't have time for friends" is also true in many cases. But they never know when it might be useful for them to know how to make conversation without hostilely defending themselves against anticipated hostility that might not even exist.
So, to all those teachers...only a few of whom are still alive...Most of you were honestly trying to teach some people something. Most of you would have had something to teach me, if you'd allowed yourselves to get beyond drilling into the slow learners what normal minds absorbed from reading the textbook in the first week of each year. All I can say I actually learned from you was a little math from Mr. Ed, a little geography from Mr. Tall, a little anatomy from Mrs. Brick, and how to play the French horn (badly); but that's not your fault. Wherever you are, I thank all of you for putting up with the little monster I was and the miserable factory-line-based system that made me it.
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