Writing Snail Mail

I’m working on a blog post that keeps growing and growing, longer and longer, and I’m fretting over how to deal with it.  Are all the words necessary? Should I divide into parts? As I get frustrated, I think about the writing process.

Homemade envelope from a friend

I remember when I taught middle school and later at various colleges and universities, my students would often become stuck at the beginning of a writing assignment. I advised the students to jump-start their writing by pretending they were composing a letter to a close friend. At this point in the writing process, don’t worry about being perfect, I say.  You’re just sharing information informally with someone. 

This strategy often worked as long as the student fulfilled Part 2 of the process-- revising their writing in accordance with the assignment and editing their grammar, punctuation and spelling, as needed.

I left teaching and moved into administration at the right time, because any effectiveness of that strategy went out the window some years ago.  I can imagine the blank stares of today’s youth.

 “A letter?” someone asks. “I just have to write one letter? I'll take 'T.'”  

“No, I’m not talking about the alphabet. I’m talking about a letter like snail mail.” I say.

“I’ve heard of snail mail, is it anything like email?  My grandmother still uses email,” one student says.

“My grandmother likes Messenger,” says another.

 “I use Snapchat,” a girl volunteers.

“Whatsapp is where it’s at,” the boy sitting across from the girl tells her, flirting a little bit in the process.

“I think Viber is the best,” another girl jumps into the conversation, which is spiraling away from the issue at hand.

“I’m not talking about electronic mail,” I take another stab at it. “I’m talking about letters like the mail carrier brings and puts in your mailbox, the kind you take to the post office.”

Handmade envelope for a friend

“Dr. Edgerton-Scott, we need help writing a critique of this article. Why are you talking about something that no one understands?” another student asks.

“Never mind,” I say. “Who wants to share their strategies for getting started on the critique of the article you’ve read?”

“What’s a critique? they ask. “Are we going to have to think?”

The Sixth Grade Self-Contained Class of 1979

My sixth grade self-contained class
(with apologies to the students with half a face)
I'm the first "kid" in first row on a bad hair day.

Me in 1979 when I was teaching the 6th grade self-contained class

Years ago, I taught middle school. My last year teaching in the Knox County, Tennessee, school system I had the most wonderful self-contained sixth grade class. It was an unusual situation. The parents had petitioned for their children to stay together in a self-contained class through sixth grade, instead of changing classes and having a different teacher for each subject. The students had all been together in a self-contained fifth grade class at another school. Surprisingly, my middle school honored the parents' request and chose me to teach the class.  Previously, I had been teaching social studies to 125+ middle school students.

I loved teaching that year, though teaching math and science challenged me. I used the project method of organizing the curriculum whereby we explored a topic from all perspectives, cutting across traditional subject boundaries. If the students came up with a good teaching topic or strategy, we would go with it.

While I did have paperwork to complete, supervisors to please, and only a moderately supportive principal, it was nothing like today.  Generally, as long as my class didn't bother the principal or other classes, we were left alone. I had confidence that as long as the children were focused and involved in their learning, their test scores would take care of themselves.  I stressed reading and writing and engagement. I wanted the students to stick with a task to completion while experiencing the joy of learning.

I've thought of those sixth graders so often, and wondered if they remembered their sixth grade class and teacher. When cleaning my library recently, I found the 1979 school yearbook that I had forgotten existed. Finally I had the students' last names that had faded from my memory in the ensuing decades. I wondered if I could find them on Facebook--those amazing children who would be moving into middle age by now.

First I decided to try to locate the student with whom I spent the most time. This sixth-grade girl lived near the school and would often stay late to help me with various classroom chores. I immediately found her and recognized her from her current photograph, but she had also posted an older photo from her youth that confirmed it.  I couldn't believe my luck. I glanced through her page and located another of the students, a boy, who was so special to me.

I told my sister, who also used to teach middle school, about my search and asked her if she thought it was appropriate if I reached out to these individuals. I didn't want to creep them out. She assured me that any former student would be pleased to hear from me.

I first sent a private Facebook message to the female student. In a couple days I received a response. She said she had been searching for me off and on for years. However, I left Tennessee after teaching them, moved to a Sioux reservation to teach at an Indian college there. I next moved to Louisiana, divorced, and changed my name--all factors making it more difficult to locate me through the internet. She was delighted to hear from me (but not half as happy as I was to find her).

She told me she married the "little red-headed boy" from our class. I remembered him immediately. He was the quintessential American boy--red hair, freckles, hyperactive but just adorable. She said he still appreciated my taking the time to figure how he learned, then I gearing my teaching to his learning style. She said I was his favorite teacher ever! I know I encouraged him in his creative writing. She said he hoped I remembered his story of the red dot in space. I would need a little more prompting on the plot to pull that up from the depths of my aging brain, but I sure remembered him. I even remember where he usually sat in class.

She filled me in on her life, the good times and the not-so-good. Her career path has been as unique and diverse as I would expect from a gifted child. She keeps in touch with several of the other students from the class. I remember them all. Perhaps on one of my drives back to my hometown in Virginia, I can stop in Tennessee and reconnect with the students who remain in the area.

Next I wrote the other student I saw on her Facebook page, the boy who has continued to be her friend over the years. He lives in the DC area with his daughter.  He told me I had touched his life when he was going through a rough period in his childhood. He is now a successful counselor and appears to be a wonderful dad. Again I swelled with pride and pleasure seeing the man he has become.

(I've purposefully not provided names nor many details about the students in this post. I respect their privacy and in no way want to intrude on their lives. And don't ask what I had done to my hair, or more importantly--why? I think a permanent was involved.)

I'm not quite sure what my takeaway is from this experience. I guess I will go with the obvious one. Teaching in the public schools is difficult, even more challenging, if not impossible, today. There is no money in teaching. There is frequently little appreciation for a teacher's efforts, but there's a chance you can make a difference in a child's life that he/she will carry into adulthood. And if you're lucky, you will meet students who will steal into your heart. You will never forget them and know that your life has been the better for knowing them.

Bad Teacher and the Great Rodent Experiment

During my teaching career, I was sometimes like “Bad Teacher.” We had mice we kept in a cage in my sixth grade, self-contained classroom.  They were brought in by a student.  I think he found the mother mouse and babies in the barn!  The children could take the animals out of their cages and play with them after they finished their work.  (It was a different learning environment than in classrooms today.)  When one of the mice bit a boy’s finger, I just told him to squeeze it and make it bleed, then go to the restroom and wash it well, assured him he would be fine and luckily he was.

When a very observant young man told me my favorite, red, long Indian print skirt had “bad” pictures on it, I was surprised to see what I had never noticed before--that the prints on the bottom of the skirt were lovers: a man and woman with their hands placed strategically on each other’s bodies, and this motif continued all around the skirt.  I told him it was art and not to worry about it.  He seemed to accept that explanation, and I don’t think he ever told anyone else, because I kept wearing the skirt and never saw anyone else give it a second glance. 

 

I continued to wear this skirt,
even in Louisiana as evidenced in the staged photo above
 taken at LSUHSC Children's Center around 1989.

Detail from Indian print skirt
I still own the skirt, hanging in the attic!

The rodents we had were a never-ending source of interest in the classroom and school.  When the cafeteria ladies saw a mouse in the kitchen, they blamed our class.  We went back and counted our mice and assured them it was not one of ours.  One day a boy informed me that something was wrong with a mouse, and upon further examination, we discovered she had delivered babies and it was those tiny, ugly, bald bodies the boy had seen. 

I don’t recall what happened to the mice.  At some point I may have sent most of them back to the farm.  A couple came home with me for the summer, caught a chill and died. 

The story of Romeo, our class’ white rat, was much more poignant.  The whole class loved this friendly white rat, donated by a student.  We read the book The Rats of NIMH, and the children took turns taking Romeo home for holidays.  He stayed by himself at school most weekends.  One Monday Romeo wasn’t there when we arrived, having apparently escaped from his cage.  We searched all over the school and told everyone to be looking for him.  The cafeteria workers were less than thrilled to hear about his escape, because they figured he would head for the kitchen.  The children left surreptitious food trails in the hall leading back to our room, but nothing worked.  We finally figured Romeo had made his way to the outside. 

We left on Christmas break, and when we returned, a little girl found Romeo dead in his cage.  It appeared that he had returned to his familiar home over break, but we had long since stopped leaving food and water out.  The children were devastated, some of the girls were crying.  We put Romeo in a box and after lunch buried him on the edge of the school grounds.  I don’t recall if we had a ceremony for him or not, but he was mourned. 

It may have been after Romeo had passed, as we say in the South, that someone donated two long-haired gerbils to the class.  All went well for a while, but then they came down with some sort of illness.  The father of one of the students was a professor at the University of Tennessee vet school, so she asked if she could take them home for her father to doctor.  He was unable to save them, and thus ended the great rodent experiment at Cedar Grove Middle School in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I Am Half Sick of Shadows

When I was in my twenties, I had a short-lived career as a middle school teacher.  One year I taught a sixth grade self-contained class, which I adored. I can still remember how gratifying it was when I saw the students get excited about reading—my passion—or to have the children propel me on a path of learning.  One such student was Leslie who lived near the school.  Leslie loved science, as did many of the other students. 


School pictures when I was middle school teacher!

Science was one of my least favorite subjects in school, but I tried my best to be a good science teacher, mostly by following the children’s lead.  We inspected earth worms bought at a local bait shop, and there were always cages of rodents, e.g. white rat, gerbils, mice, in the classroom when students’ mothers gave their children ultimatums that these pets had to find other homes.

That year when science fair time rolled around, Leslie wanted to do a specific science project.  She had an older sister in nursing school, and she liked to look at her sister’s anatomy textbooks.  Leslie decided she wanted to compare the bone structure of a chicken with that of a pigeon.  She made her mother cook a whole chicken, which was a feat because Leslie’s mother didn’t cook.  But they cooked the whole chicken and Leslie took all the meat off of it. 

However, when it came to boiling the flesh off a pigeon, her mother drew the line.  I got the school’s science teacher to order Leslie a pigeon and when it arrived, Leslie asked if she could stay after school and boil the pigeon.  I don’t remember if we used hot plates or if there was a home economics lab, but I did learn that cooking a pigeon preserved in formaldehyde is not a good idea!  The smell was awful, the fumes probably deadly, but I didn’t know any better.  Luckily the windows in the school opened.  The janitor came to see what we were doing, but I don’t remember the principal showing up. 

Ultimately Leslie had to complete this process elsewhere, but she persevered and somehow got the pigeon cleaned and her science project completed.  I’m not sure how she kept the skeletons together or if she was just interested in certain bones, but her project won the school science fair and went to the regional fair.

I think of Leslie, the budding scientist, when I read the Flavia de Luce mysteries, written for adults but featuring Flavia, an eleven-year-old sleuth and mad chemist whose life revolves around her love for chemistry.  Flavia sleeps in her laboratory in the rambling English mansion that belongs to her family.  She and her two older sisters are cared for by their forgetful father whose energies focus on his stamp collection and trying to save Buckshaw, his late wife’s ancestral home, from creditors.  Maternal nurturing in the household comes from the cook and from Dugger, a faithful family retainer who suffers flashbacks from his experiences as a POW during World War II. 



I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
Alan Bradley
(Delacorte Press, 2011)

It’s Christmas time, and Flavia and her sisters won’t even have their minimal holiday decorations this year because their father has rented their house to a movie company in an effort to raise funds.  The girls are ordered not to disturb the movie people when they arrive, but Flavia manages to befriend the famous actress Phyllis Wyvern, while another sister is given a walk-on part in the movie.

Then the village vicar weighs in and talks Wyvern and her co-star into performing a short pageant at Buckshaw to raise money for the church’s new roof fund.  The whole village turns out for the play, only to get stranded at Buckshaw by a blizzard.  When one of the acting company ends up dead, there’s a houseful of suspects and no way to notify the police.  Flavia’s scientific experiment to prove the existence of Father Christmas, aka Santa Claus, ends up exposing the murderer who tries to add the eleven-year-old busybody to the death toll. 

This novel isn’t my favorite of this series.  It is hard to keep straight the large cast of characters, the plot and motive for the killing are convoluted, but I do like Flavia.  Her penchant for concocting poisons is over the top, as is the sibling rivalry between her and her sisters.  The series, set in the 1950’s, uses exaggeration to create humor.

I Am Half Sick of Shadows is a line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott,” that describes a lonely woman isolated from the real world and implies that all is not as it seems.  There is a foreshadowing that something is going to change. 

Author Alan Bradley is a Canadian writer who was encouraged by his wife to enter a fiction writing contest sponsored by the Canadian Crime Writers’ Association.  The result was the first Flavia de Luce mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.  He was affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan where he worked as Director of Television Engineering for 25 years.  He now travels and writes fulltime.  He has published six Flavia mysteries, in addition to screenplays and biographies.  The Flavia books are under option to be made into movies for television.