Friday
I cite today a Terry Pratchett passage from Thief of Time to honor our nation’s teachers, who are undergoing unimaginable stress at the moment. My grandson Alban, who attends Hearst Elementary School in Washington, D.C., has just learned that he will be taught remotely for the foreseeable future. My two oldest granddaughters, meanwhile, are being held back from Ivy Creek Elementary in Buford, Georgia since the virus is still raging in Gwinnett County, with 22,000 recorded cases and 300 deaths. Teachers are expected to smile and cope.
Pratchett sounds like he was inspired by Mary Poppins (from the novel, not the film) in his depiction of Susan. She refuses to be intimidated by administrators and sets the agenda in the classroom rather than letting others set it for her.
It was always very hard to disapprove of Miss Susan in her presence, because if you did, she gave you a Look. It was not in any way a threatening look. It was cool and calm. You just didn’t want to see it again.
The Look worked in the classroom, too. Take homework, another Archaic Practice the headmistress was ineffectively Against. No dog ever ate the homework of one of Miss Susan’s students, because there was something about Miss Susan that went home with them; the dog brought them a pen and watched imploringly while they finished it, instead. Miss Susan seemed to have an unerring instinct for spotting laziness, and effort, too. Contrary to the headmistress’s instructions, Miss Susan did not let the children do what they liked. She let them do what she liked. It had turned out to be a lot more interesting for everyone.
In other words, she has respect for herself, for the children, and for the subject matter.
I’m no teacher of small children but I appreciate how, last spring, Alban’s teachers allowed those of us who took on the teaching responsibilities to depart from the lesson plans and do what we liked. With his parents’ permission, I decided to teach eight-year-old Alban poetry.
I’ll describe all we’ve done in a blog post next week, just mentioning here that he has filled up two pages with poetic terms, can recognize dactylic tetrameter when he encounters it, never fails to point out half rhymes, and is currently enthralled with onomatopoeia (both the word and the concept). He picks up poetic vocabulary the way I (and he too) used to pick up dinosaur names.
As he sees it, it’s all a game, and last June, when the school year ended, he asked that we continue through the summer. Now there’s a chance we’ll keep going until at least Christmas. Stay tuned.