Column: Thank a teacher you can vote
With the recent elections almost flushed from our noggins, it’s important to remember the famous words of Thomas Jefferson, “Stupid voters can really screw up a democracy.” Or, maybe it was Bill Clinton.
Regardless, without educated folks, we’d end up with voters like ballot-challenged, bone-headed Floridians. So, who pokes the smarts into our electorate?
Correct – teachers. Not just any teachers but outstanding educators; those who have a passion for teaching, fighting the homework apathy tide, persevering through pigheaded parent pitfalls, and getting up close and personal with students harboring more germs than a truck stop’s urinal.
Who’s your favorite teacher? No, you can’t use Mr. Rogers – although his intellectually stimulating lessons made him a teacher phenomenon. Can you say phenomenon? I knew you could. I like the way you say it.
One of my best teachers was Ms. Shirley Carrier or SMC (as we cryptically referred to her). As a sniveling, pimply junior high student, I constantly doubted her value on the face of this earth but I’ve grown to appreciate the fact she never killed me.
Us guys would congregate in the back of her classroom, struggling with the question, “Was she hired because she looked like the school’s mascot, a bulldog?” Sure it was cruel and, truth be known, with her dangling earrings, cats-eye glasses, and ruby-red lipstick, she more accurately resembled a Pekinese.
I did my fair share of damage to the English language back then. I found confiscating participial phrases confusing, identifying split infidels tortuous, castrating subordinated conjunctions mind boggling, and nauseous vs. nauseated constipating. My mind still hemorrhages deciding between a comma, colon, semicolon or an ice-cold beer.
Ms. Carrier was an incredible teacher, exemplified by her sincere concern for my ineptitude. She’d return my papers plastered with red comments. Not because she was an evil, vindictive, demon-possessed alien but because she wanted me to do better. OK, the alien thing might be true.
Thumbing through my old SMC-mandated journal, it’s amazing I could stretch “corn” to fill a whole line. I also made astute analyses like, “The poem by Robert Francis is very hard to read. You must read it and think of what you are reading.”
Obviously, SMC bought red pens by the truckload. She worked so diligently trying to teach a rotten brat like me and I never saw it coming.
Now, remember lousy teachers you’ve had. Those who apathetically employed worksheets for enrichment activities, assigned asinine group projects, showed irrelevant videos, frantically devised activities five minutes before class, or who spoke constantly but taught nothing. Yeah, I’ve had them, too.
My college freshman English prof skillfully killed numerous class periods verbosely expounding upon curious, revitalizing sensations such as eating a bowl of granola.
I’d work diligently on writing a paper only to get it back a couple of weeks later with a lone, edifying red check mark with a sub-passing grade. Let me be candid – it only took a few of those before I resorted to copying Reader’s Digest articles.
No, I’m not proud, but Mr. Granola left me clueless on how to improve. His wasn’t a teacher but an over-paid storyteller whose fairytale characters included a tongue, saliva and delicately sweetened oat clusters.
Fortunately, good teachers’ lessons stick with us. Years ago, I worked as a software technical writer coining helpful phrases like “Select Reset and enter the values again,” and “Press [Enter].”
SMC’s lessons became my salvation; outline, revise and rewrite, be concise, and the infamous “check your spelling.”
SMC has passed on to English heaven where the students use good penmanship, write rough drafts and always have full two-page journal entries. I’ve blown my chance to tell her, so I’ll tell those hard-working teachers out there who strive each day to make a difference in impressionable students’ minds. Your efforts are not without positive results … albeit, sometimes delayed.
It’s imperative our democracy has knowledgeable voters. We don’t need any more Floridians, botching ballots by drawing a stick figure alongside the candidate’s name or punching it out with a toothbrush.
I wonder if any of them were my junior high classmates.
(Joe Barnhart is a freelance humorist from Dillon. Send comments to: lifestooserious@gmail.com ).