I’m assuming. OTOH, my mother did once burn off the eyelashes of his most famous student, so who knows?
When I was a kid I loved my parents’ teaching stories. My father would have been a great college professor (in fact he was briefly in junior colleges) but was a bit “heady” for Alabama public junior high/high schools. His students respected him but thought he was weird as hell (true story: once when his students were insisting that Thanatopsis was too archaic and ridiculous to read let alone memorize he told them “Hell, I taught the opening of it to my four year old daughter and she can’t even read yet!”; when they called his bluff he went to the principal’s office, called my mother and told her “Bring Kathy down heah!” and had my four year old sister recite, in a little bitty southern girl voice, TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
Another favorite memory of him as a teacher is from much later. In 1981 he chaperoned a bus of high schoolers, many of them from very poor and inner city (B’ham and Montgomery) houses, to a conference in Oregon and used the chartered bus’s PA system to give lectures on the history and people of the land they were passing through. Most of them weren’t terribly concerned and one kept interrupting his lectures to blast funk on his refrigerator sized hi-fi 8 track boombox. When my father got enough of this (both because he hated modern music and hated disrespect even more) he confiscated the boombox and for the rest of the trip the class was subjected to Sons of the Pioneers, Tennessee Ernie Ford and others of the old man’s favorites from said boombox. (My mother and brother and I were on the same trip following in the Datsun and had his 8 tracks with us.)
A long story about my parents and Alabama Education: my father tried to run for Superintendent of Education but with all the insanity in his family and with the problem of integration it was a damned from the start endeavor. Daddy was not a liberal except by the broadest definition of the term, but he was a realist who knew without doubt that integration was going to happen and that if Alabama accepted it they could maneuver a much better public image and more state aid and that was the speech he gave. His opponents of course gave the “If you want niggers going to school with your kids and swimming in your pools and dancing with your daughters, you just go right ahead and elect the professor here” and of course Daddy lost in a landslide. To make matters worse he was called before the new superintendent and told “Well perfessir, I’m concerned that you might be way too smart a man to teach our children, but I know how much you think of the nigger intellect, so we’re sending you over to Doby Academy this year.” Doby Academy was the all black school that existed for the blacks who did not want to integrate (which was the vast majority, fear being the main incentive.) This was ca. 1965.
My father had a family to support (the farm was in its best year a side income and most years lost money) and no choice, so he accepted the transfer. My mother, a woman with many flaws but an overdeveloped sense of duty and personal honor, was also teaching in the public schools at the time and requested a transfer to Doby as well. They were the only two white teachers there. Their classes started out hating them and mistrustful as did many of the black teachers and by the end of the year my father had won “Favorite Instructor”. By the end of his second year (when she was pregnant with me) the senior class at Doby had a higher college entrance rate than the white public school and as recently as this decade I’ve had a middle aged black person tell me “Your daddy asked me what I was going to study in college… I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, I wasn’t going to college! And he said, yes you are, and I did. I’m a lawyer/teacher/nurse/etc. today because of your mama and daddy.” My mother also taught the senior class to sing German Christmas carols which was a huge treat. (Now, bear in mind, neither of my parents were ever what you’d call liberals on the subject of race in today’s standards- BOTH made me promise I would NEVER date a black woman, for example [I kept my promise, but careful what you wish for] and would use the N word more than I’m proud of- but they did believe that on the individual basis there was no difference between the intelligence of blacks v. whites and they were pissed at the county white education structure as well.
Flash forward to 1980 when I transferred from the all white upperscale exclusive private school in Montgomery where I’d gone since First Grade (where my mother was a teacher) to the public school in the county where I grew up. I was terrified- it was like being in prison- at my first school boys whose hair touched their collars were called into the principals office, paddled and received a haircut by his secretary, while girls on the PE teams couldn’t wear shorts. At the public school there were pregnant girls in the hallway, black kids and rednecks would pull switchblades while teachers walked by pretending not to see it, etc., and I had “DESPERATE BITCH SEEKS BULL FOR PROTECTION, POSSIBLE MATRIMONY, LUNCH MONEY AVAILABLE” tattooed on my forehead.
Ironically I made friends (or at least peace) with black students much quicker than with white students. I was stunned at how many of them laughed at my sarcasm when most whites had never understood it. Whites thought I was incredibly weird with a hint towards crazy, rumors started I was a space alien (true), I played the clown and weirdass card fairly effectively and pretty much got peace, but there was a faction of kids who always had it in for me. One was a black kid I’ll call Jeff (because that was his name) who couldn’t stand me and he was in, more or less, a gang. They stole my watch, my lunch money, used to hassle me in the hallways, etc…
The more or less leader of the gang was Moon. One day when his buds were picking at me in the men’s room Moon walked up and told them to cut it out, and when they left he said “You know, I was talking to my mama the other day and mentioned you, I said that’s something as crazy as that fool Jon D— would say at school. She say ‘D+++’? His mama and daddy used to teach at Doby? Then she say, they the reason your auntie went to nursing school and made something of herself. I was gonna go to but got pregnant wid you instead. Then she sang a Nazi Christmas song! Shiiit!” And that particular gang never bothered me again. (Whitetrash kids, different story.)
The point is, if you’re going to be driving take the sunblocker out of the windshield.
