Life Matters - August 2, 2023
Leaving one school and going to another can be a rather unsettling experience for a seven-year-old boy, although knowing I would be going to school with church and neighbor boys helped. I was going to miss Jay, the “English” boy in my grade who seemed to have noticed my lost eagerness and befriended me early on in our first-grade class. There was one thing about him though that I knew I wouldn’t miss. Don’t get me wrong, I did like girls, but Jay was—according to the gauge I knew my older siblings would use—a bit girl-crazy. He introduced me to the novel idea that “all the guys in school have girlfriends” and he thought I should have one. So, I chose a pretty brunette, of which the only memory I retained is of her sitting at her desk bent diligently over her work. The only person who ever knew she was my girlfriend was Jay. She still doesn’t know, as my shyness always caused me to steer clear of her. And no, I don’t know her name!
The new school was a parochial school in a one-room red brick schoolhouse that several churches had gone together and bought from the government after consolidation into buildings such as Western Public and the busing of children had begun. Morning prayer and Bible reading was on its way out, as was the common belief that God is our Creator. The teaching that we all just evolved from happenstance was on the way into the school curriculum and conversely, many conservative-thinking parents (God bless them) were on the way out with their children.
The first half-year of Amsterdam Parochial School, with “yours truly” in second grade, was rough to say the least. Our teacher, a young girl who drove a shiny black car, assured us on the first day of school, after introductions, Bible, prayer and singing, that we were going to be a school based upon, and run by, love. I don’t remember much of her fuzzy, flowery speech about love, but I do know there were some upper-grade brains absorbing information that was to mold them into opportunistic barbarians for the first half of the term. The limits of our teacher’s “love,” was to be tested “to the max” as the “upper graders,” especially the boys, kept getting more and more pushy in their quest for her limits. Alas her “love” knew no bounds and neither did the mischief of her “barbarians.” She became as adept at ignoring misbehavior in order to “win them with love” as her upper-grade students were in finding new ways to perpetuate mischief, including, but not limited to, slipping out through the big windows, open to the cooling breeze, to play softball during class hours. I have a vivid memory-picture of one eighth-grade rapscallion placing his despised hardcover arithmetic book on his desk and quietly drilling a hole though it with a hand-powered brace and bit set. During class hours. While the teacher ignored the scene. But even this second grader could tell that she knew. That was the day I lost confidence in her “love.” It was also the day my pity turned to scorn.
I have now come full circle and feel nothing but compassion for this misguided, floundering young lady, who, from today’s perspective, appears—in my experience—as a harbinger of what has gone overwhelmingly wrong in so many homes and learning institutions of America, except that tolerance of mischief has regressed to tolerance of all manner of sensuality, to tolerance and in some cases even promotion, of sodomite perversions.
Still, there are, I trust, many teachers who have not surrendered their God-given sense of right and wrong to any government institutional swamp, but have retained their sensibilities, going on to bless their communities and eventually, grateful students. I am one such grateful student. Grateful for school and Eleanor Martin, my middle of second-grade through eighth-grade teacher in a one-room brick schoolhouse, in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. God bless her and all those adhering, or coming back to, Biblical ways of teaching. Life Matters!