A Story About My Best Teacher

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks for stories about reviewers' best teachers. 

I was not homeschooled--homeschooling was recognized as legal in Virginia during my first year at college--but I'd have to say that my mother was the best teacher I had. No contest. Her mother and sister were teachers too, and good ones. Not all of the teachers at the schools I attended were bored menopausal time-servers who resented having faster than average learners in a class, though many of them were. My husband was a natural-born teacher, wherever he went, but that came later. But although Mother never thought of motherhood as her primary vocation in life, she believed it was her duty to be a good mother and teach her children things, and like most people who take on that duty she found it to be a pleasure. I remember a few bored, snarky, adult-type things she said to any of us children because they were unusual. Most of the time she was the only teacher my brother and I had who knew what we had learned and what we were ready to learn. 

The paid professional teachers at our schools hated Mother. She had not taken a teacher training course and thought grade levels were something everyone ought to want to surpass. For the first six years the public school teachers thought all children ought to be working on the same level, determined by age. When the schools finally got around to assessing where people's understanding of high school course material really was, well no wonder the teachers didn't really like us or our parents. The'rents didn't leave them much room to teach us anything. A placement test I took in grade nine indicated that the English class where I'd fit in best would be taught in college; I had things to learn in ninth grade algebra, but dang, I was having fun, trying to figure out the questions on the placement test for tenth grade algebra. A test my brother took in grade seven indicated that he ought to have been taking most of his classes in high school, if not college, but he could still benefit from eighth grade algebra. Mother had been allowed to skip grade two, and thought we ought to have been allowed to skip a few years of school too. 

Most people on both sides of the extended family, I think now, have some sort of special talent--academic or otherwise. One summer afternoon I heard some children chattering past the house. "They want me to take an extra ninth grade science course next year because I'm too young to go to college," one little fellow was squeaking. We are a family where that sort of simple statement of fact is not mistaken for showing off. Typically our talents show by age five, and we're using them on an ordinary-adult level in our early teens. 

I think it's been more valuable, on the whole, to grow up seeing that people with talents for cooking or building or teaching are not less intelligent than people with talents for math or writing. I don't remember choosing to be a writer. I remember knowing that I was a writer, though not yet a good one, because I wanted to write down stories at age five, and there was no doing anything about it. Well, Mother was a cook and there was no doing anything about that, either. Dad was a math-head. Dad's IQ score was a little higher than mine; both of our scores were well above Mother's. Neither of us entertained any delusions about being "smarter" than Mother. If the IQ test measured talents that are useful beyond the classroom, her score would probably have been higher than Dad's or mine.

It did occur to Mother, in times of friction with our primary school teachers, that we might have had an easier time if we hadn't  been encouraged to work so far ahead of grade level. But what was she supposed to do? Tell us to put down those books and watch television? We didn't have television. We liked learning things, and Mother did too. At most she could tell us to put down those books and do some chores. Fine. So in grade three I was the next to smallest eight-year-old in the room, I wanted to read books on the middle school shelves in the library and wasn't allowed to, and I also made some of my own clothes, baked light breads all by myself, and was learning how to bake yeast bread. That must have made me soooo much easier for other little girls to relate to. Fortunately nobody really expected children to relate to each other; if we'd learned to choose a game and play it without fighting or damaging property, we were doing well. 

Music was the subject where I've been most conscious of a gap between what most children used to be expected to learn, without special help, and most children now seem to be expected to be unable to understand. Before television, almost everyone sang. In grade two or three Mr. Music brought in a tape recorder one day and recorded my class singing "Silent Night," in unison. With just a brief admonition about everybody making a nice clean jump between the notes in "peace", all at once, and not sliding up through the notes in between, we were good enough to be broadcast on the radio; good enough to make the teaching tape for subsequent classes. I think each class made a teaching tape of one or two songs. It was expected that even small children could sing on key, so by and large we all did. It was expected that any normal person could sing all the verses of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Mother sat me down and said "Your national anthem is in your Girl Scout Handbook. You can learn it this afternoon," and I did. It was news to me to read, as an adult, that most Americans don't think they can sing all of even one verse of our national anthem. It's not meant to be an easy song, but you can, if you try. In the present century I've heard adults intentionally singing nursery songs out of tune "because that's the way children sing...it's the way children can relate to singing." Not children who grew up around people who could sing a song right. Our accents may have toned down to a level that makes communication with visitors easier than it used to be; still, on the whole, I think we're poorer since we got television.

My parents' idea of preparing us for adult life was a bit behind the times. We were prepared to be good homesteaders, good survivalists. We were not prepared to fit into the social network that determined who got full-time work in our little town. I can't really blame the'rents for that. As an adult I was told by a trusted friend that the essential networking skill I lacked was a sense of the hierarchy of who didn't have to show me as much respect as I showed them, and whom I could vent my feelings on by disrespecting if I wanted to. Well. There was truth in that friendly advice. But that was a "skill" my parents didn't want their children to learn, and one I don't believe God ever wanted me to learn. All of God's creatures deserve some respect just for being living creatures. Mere seniority deserves a certain amount and kind of respect; disability deserves a different kind. A few people deserve special respect. They are not, ever, the ones who begin with disrespect for others. A person who barks orders at you or doesn't listen when you answer person's questions, even when you are four years old, is a natural inferior whom you want to discourage from talking to you.

Anyway, instead of teaching us whom to flatter and whom to show the fundamental nastiness of people who believe in social hierarchies, my parents taught us how to find food and shelter, make things and repair things, find information we didn't have and pass on information we had. Both of them did the teaching. Being taught anything by Drill Sergeant Dad was not fun, although it was possible to learn things by observing Dad when he was not trying to teach anybody anything. Being taught anything by Mother was almost always fun.