Life lessons learned early — at school

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/11/2024 (434 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve had some wonderful schoolteachers in my time, my dear father among them. You know the kind — they take an interest in who you are, encourage you to strive, kindle your fire for learning, tell you that you’re doing great, demonstrate a passion for what they’re teaching. They make you want to excel, both for yourself and for them.

Teaching isn’t just a job for those folks; it’s a calling.

I’ve also had teachers — a few — who weren’t as encouraging. Some could be outright mean.

I remember once, as a kindergartener, being made to stand in front of pupils in a higher grade and spell some multisyllabic word, which I dutifully did.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was a pawn in a cruel game, being used by a teacher to shame an older boy who had difficulty learning; played like a puppet to make another child feel worthless and humiliated. If only I’d known… but of course, I was an innocent child, happy to please a teacher.

Lately I’ve been thinking of another lesson learned in elementary school. An enthusiastic kid with long, blond hair and a gap-toothed smile, I was eager to absorb things and to get to know our new teacher, who I’ll call Miss X.

But Miss X was not warm and smiling like my other teachers had been. She was pale and drawn, with a faraway look, as if her mind was someplace else and not with this bunch of bright-eyed kids in a two-classroom schoolhouse in outport Newfoundland.

She usually wore a black turtleneck and dark slacks. The wire-framed glasses perched on her aquiline nose made me think of John Lennon, minus the mischievous spark.

Sometimes, if someone talked out of turn or was a bit too rambunctious, she’d rap the back of the student’s hand with her knuckles. I remember being rapped once and feeling more psychological pain and confusion than physical hurt.

I wondered why Miss X was a teacher, as she seemed to take no pleasure in it. I don’t remember seeing her smile.

One day we were excited because our class was going to watch a film in the afternoon. It was a break from reading a textbook and doing exercises, which we often had to do noiselessly while Miss was teaching another grade in the same room.

When the time came for the movie, we saw Miss X setting up a slide projector. I can’t remember if only our grade was supposed to see the show or the entire multi-grade classroom; I can’t see how anyone could have avoided it, frankly, with the big screen set up at the front of the class.

But the show was not a show at all, but a series of photographs of Miss X’s younger brother, who she told us had died of an illness when he was the same age as us. I’m not certain what the sickness was; leukemia, perhaps. I know it was something that sounded rare and dangerous and clearly deadly, capable of snuffing out a child’s life — a child who presumably had loved rough-and-tumble games, riding his bike, climbing trees and whacking a ball with a bat, just like we did.

And now he was gone, this dark-haired boy who looked so solemn in all his school photos, some of them with the same kind of homespun photography backdrops as our own.

Miss X would look straight ahead as she pressed the button to move each image along. I can still hear the whirring sound and the click as a new slide settled into place.

I had the feeling she had watched these pictures a hundred times before. Whirr-click. Whirr-click. Whirr-click.

No one spoke. What were we to say? Certainly we were sorry for her loss, but we weren’t sure what the lesson was — be careful or you, too, could die young? I remember thinking that anything we might say would only irritate her; remind her that we were still living while her beloved brother was dead.

I’ve been thinking about Miss X in recent weeks, perhaps because I just lost a dear friend to leukemia and that brought things flooding back.

The year we spent in her classroom taught me many things — some of them painful truths that should not have been downloaded onto children, but others were valuable, like empathy.

I see her now as grief-stricken, numbed by the depth of her pain while having to take on a classroom of children, perhaps before she was emotionally ready; kids the same age as the brother she’d loved and lost.

I learned this: that life can be hard, and sometimes the load someone else is carrying is much bigger than you can see.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s.

pamelajframpton@gmail.com

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