The Third-Grade Teacher I Forgot Long Ago

Ladies and gentleman, buckle your seatbelts and prepare your journey back to the third grade, back to a dark-clouded and ill-fated fall day in 1965. But you will remember your own similar inauspicious days, sad and undeserving as they may be. When the bell tolls, remember: It tolls for thee--except, on this day, you are left behind with the merciless teacher for a little time "after school," the worst two words in the vocabulary of a pitiful third-grade scholar. Read on.

              LaGrange, Georgia—As I write, the amazin’ blonde and I are stationed at Coca-Cola and Glory’s house off of the Roanoke Road in my hometown. As you who have followed our musings, writings, and storytelling for a quarter of a century know, our trips back home are frequent and necessary.

Perhaps it is the images of the tall pines embedded in that deep red Georgia clay that requires it, or the accents at every turn that are sweeter than the sweet tea that sits on the table at every meal, or seeing the people who knew you when they measured you relative to where you came up to on a grasshopper, or all of the above. It is a reset, and things seem to stay set until the next time.

              Sometimes it is just the driving around and taking in the scenes as if you were eight going on nine again. As Coca-Cola and I drove around one afternoon, we drove past Southwest Elementary School where I first began to show the world an amazing display of scholarship and charisma. At first sight of that two-story brick building, stationed up on a hill a mile up from the Murphy Avenue church where we attended and Preacher Miller resided—ah, how the memories started flooding over me like sea billows roll, or, better yet, like chills that come over you when you walked out into the freezing wind on those long wintry walks to this same frigid elementary school. The latter memory best characterizes our third-grade teacher Ms. Goforth to an absolute tee.

Read the sad story, my friends, and you will see firsthand that, despite a rare scholarship, all the deserved A+s and written masterpieces were all overshadowed by one dark, gloomy, terrible-horrible-no good day.

         It was the day that Ms. Goforth enjoyed my blessed presence so much that she decided for some reason that she would extend it to the after-school hours. The bell that rang to signal the end of school was merely that bell that the poet wrote about and Mr. Hemingway imitated. The answer to their dark-clouded question, “For whom does the bell toll?” rolls over our young man even today like those sea billows in the very next line: “It tolls for thee.”

Or to get right to the crux of the matter, it tolled for me! 

All my joyous classmates hit the door like it was lunchtime—Tony, Sandy, Robin,

Chris, and the rest—and they were gone as quick as a flash of lightning in the dark skies—which loomed ominously overhead—leaving behind their favorite scholar and gentleman with nothing but a “Have fun  Mr. Stevie Wonder," and a few chilling laughs that I determined right in that moment that I would repay someday—somehow, someway. Oh, yes, you learn real early in life who your friends are.

That day, as sad of a commentary as this may be, I didn’t have a single one. I would’ve sold all of them down the river for a nickel and felt I saw the buyer coming from a mile away.

         You probably wonder what such a nice, behaving young man with nine years of excellence on his ledger could’ve done to deserve such unusual punishment from this clearly eccentric and misguided teacher.

              Oh, to be completely objective, the ledger of my highly decorated elementary years had a smudge or two that warranted a couple of licks with the foot-long paddle. I say “warranted,” but only so if you consider doing a chin up on the ledge between two staircases leading down to the lunchroom worthy of licks. While I was merely showing off to Robin my athleticism, the second-grade teacher took exception to it and led me straight down to the Ms. Berda’s office and laid two licks on me that caused me, from that day forward, to have flashbacks every time I passed that ledge going down to lunch. 

                Another time, perhaps, Tony Pippen and I were sliding across the floor in the bathroom and got caught—or I got caught and I ended up taking the heat for the both of us, literally, right across the back side of my anatomy. Both of those cases were blatantly undeserving—and I told myself right then that if I ever became a teacher I would never do that to my darling students. I might have reneged on that promise later, but, fortunately for them, by then they had banned the paddle and spared at least several hundred students of realizing the same fate.

As I told my own students one day as I related this story, the young third-grade scholar’s punishment was completely unwarranted while theirs would’ve been long, long overdue.

              But the third-grade version of your favorite columnist paid both of those teachers back promptly by forgetting their names, although, being the scholar he then was I am sure they remember him well and probably read every word he has ever written for the newspaper and wish they had put more A+s on everything the future Mark Twain wrote.

“Ah, I knew he was going to be something special way back then,” they thought, yet conveniently forgetting—as teachers do—how they slapped two or three good ones on their prized pupil more than once, bringing salty tears to his puppy-dog eyes.

              Of all the unwarranted punishments that the wardens at Southwest Elementary passed out like failing papers filled with red ink, none was less merciful than old Ms. Goforth. In the most inauspicious day of my storied career, she kept her star pupil after school on a bright and beautiful fall afternoon, not even pausing for a moment to realize that he was not only a prized student but was, after hours, the star basketball player down at the Y. Slap a lick or two on your student if you must, but, please, spare the almost-famous basketball player.

               Ah, that afternoon’s incarceration was as painful as a stint knee from a bad slide on the bicycle, something I experienced many times turning into our driveway at the bottom of the steep hill beside our Juniper home. Oh, how I would have welcomed a dozen skint knees or ten-thousand licks from any number of misguided elementary school wardens over being detained from tip-off that was occurring just a hard-ride’s mile east.

The game started promptly at 4:30; and when Ms. Goforth finally released me I am sure me and my red bicycle broke all kinds of speed records and even challenged the sound barrier, a small tidbit of science knowledge that went right over the head of Ms. Goforth as she put “C-” by “Science” on my report card that I had to take home and get signed by Mama and Daddy.

“My alone-time with mean, old Ms. Goforth was torturous, ladies and gentlemen,” I often would tell my own students, only to find that even they had very little sympathy for the young scholar of 1965.

I remember how on that gloomy 1965 day the little hand on the clock on the wall ticked like a time bomb, each stroke as loud as thunder and, worse yet, as slow as Ms. Goforth’s walk to my desk when she was unhappy with something her star pupil did that may have been as simple as flipping a pencil in the air and seeing if he could catch it behind his back with his eyes closed.

Oh, no, there was never a warden like Ms. Goforth. And, did she even understand the concept of early release, or parole for good behavior? Oh, no, and I am sure, though I could not prove this, but I am sure her two-story-tall dictionary she would pull out on a whim to prove the meaning of a word omitted the word “mercy” altogether, a theory that makes me wonder what kind of man Webster himself was.

It was well after tip-off that she unshackled me and released me to the bright sun of the outside world. I hit the door running, my arms lifted high and my voice raised to the sky. The only thing missing was a white prison bus, and maybe Robin and Tony and the crew waiting outside waving signs, “You know he was innocent the whole time.”

The star player made it to the game, but, alas, the game was half over, and–without the proper mental preparation a star needs—his performance was underwhelming at the very best, and soon our beaten soldier rode home on his bike with the weight of failure on his shoulders. Through his tears he sought a way to find forgiveness for old Ms. Goforth but, alas, it lay somewhere far into the young man’s future, not his present.

         It’s not that our young man was unable to forgive almost all of the teachers’ misgivings in his Southwest Elementary School days. Even those licks to the seat of the pants only hurt for a couple of days and he found forgiveness soon thereafter.

But it was hard forgiving Ms. Goforth, and our young gentleman just couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive her—at least not ‘til the next day when she handed him back his personal narrative entitled “The Best Game I Ever Played” with an A+ in big, bold letters at the top, accompanied with the words "Good job, Stevie Wonder."

         While her tenderhearted Stevie Wonder (as she tabbed him early in his life) forgave and continued his excellence in the months ahead, it was not enough to allow his Ms. Goforth to make a lasting impression on him.

If she thought for a moment that she had, she could not have been more wrong. Why, the young man barely remembers her name, and he definitely has blotted out forever the day she deprived him of what surely would have been a storied basketball performance down at the old Y.

      And, for the record, it is mere coincidence that the young man made double sure he never again did whatever it was he did that got him incarcerated that day.

And, we suspect it was pure remorse that convinced old Ms. Goforth henceforth to put B+’s beside “Science” on his report card.

And, finally, pure-tee regret compelled her from that day forward to upgrade her future scholar’s “Conduct” grade to a well-deserved A+.