Loving Public Schools

This is a love letter to public schools. They deserve praise, and I’m here to praise. I love schools more than ice cream. I’m serious about schools. My memories of public school are mostly good. I was not punished by nuns or expelled for anything, though I remember being made to sit under a teacher’s desk for a while because

I was a chatterbox. Miss Olson also had a closet where she confined other miscreants. That was in second grade. I never saw Miss Olson smile, but we didn’t think it odd. Our primary teachers were a crabby lot. Miss Hayes once accused me of cheating, and I was so hurt that I cried until she recanted.

My eighth-grade teacher was pretty, the only pretty teacher I had. She didn’t teach us much, but she loved tennis and taught us to play and score, an invaluable lesson. I wondered about her: why wasn’t she married? Why did she bother to teach us kids in a small elementary school? Was she hiding something? She belonged in high heels in a place with handsome men.

Little House on the Prairie was the highlight of my education in those eight years. I remember every volume of those novels, read to us aloud by our teacher in fifth grade. I learned no geography, no mathematics, no smooth cursive, but I could listen to those stories with complete concentration. (I couldn’t watch the TV series that came out years later because they weren’t perfect adaptations.)

My seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Miller, was old, smart, and a model of perfection. She marked me forever the day she approached my desk and tilted the paper I was working on so I could write normally with my left hand. That moment changed everything! Years later, in graduate school, I thought of Mrs. Miller as I studied to be a teacher myself. I hoped to become like her — soft-spoken, wise, demanding and kind.

High school was awful. I attended a huge public high school that was ugly and tired of us. I do remember two good teachers who left their marks on my soul. Mr. Sardisco, a gruff Government teacher, took me aside one day and said, “Elaine, you should go to college.” What a gift! My Latin teacher, too, encouraged me. She was a homely taskmaster who took learning seriously. Otherwise, high school was a time of fretting over everything while enduring boring, ignorant teachers, or horrible gym trials, like field hockey. Still, I had a girlfriend who took me in hand and made life bearable, so I survived the fires of a school without a heart.

Those bad times haven’t changed my faith in public schools. Many schools are places where our children can learn to respect each other and maybe even come away educated.  Like the real world, schools offer both the advantages of friendships and the pitfalls of awful demands, like field hockey. To overprotect our kids from the realities of a public education, I think, is keeping them from learning about the human condition.

I became a high-school teacher determined to change the lives of teenagers. I would be like Mrs. Miller and soar the heights of excellence. However, at my first teaching job my fellow faculty members, in an act of cruelty, voted me in charge of the school dance/charity food drive. I barely survived the confusion and preparations. My classroom that year was noisy, funny and undisciplined. I returned home exhausted at the end of the term, thinking about all I’d done wrong and ready to take up any profession that didn’t require teaching teens.

As chance would have it, there was a shortage of teachers in our area, and the principal of another school came calling. He persuaded me to try again at a new school that had large, airy classrooms and his guiding hand. It was either that or work for my father in retail. Fortunately I’d learned from my mistakes, so my teaching experience in the new setting went well, and I stayed until I retired to raise two children.

I wish our public schools everywhere were properly financed so there could be small classes led by teachers with skills and insights. I had to watch my son bused to a distant school during desegregation days, and it was an awful place. My daughter never adjusted to harsh discipline in her school. Maybe Miss Olson and her closet could have helped.

Failures like those don’t mean we give up. There are exceptional public schools everywhere, including in our area, and charter schools are a solution some have tried. But we must do better for our kids and offer free public schools that are not overcrowded or understaffed, but are welcoming places that deserve a love letter.

‍