Let Us Now Praise Famous Teachers

Andree and Dublin

The events referenced below took place long before educrats, those who couldn’t teach and had made it their life’s work to teach teachers – destroyed education. The names have here been changed to protect both the innocent and guilty.

Mrs. Smith was what once had been known as a “tough teacher” entirely immersed in her subject area, meaning she gave Fs to those of her students who richly deserved Fs, over the protesting cackles of their parents, who imagined their sons and daughters graduating with honors from Yale University.

My mother recalled a call she had received from Mrs. Smith concerning her reproachless, though unawakend, son.

“You know, your boy, Donald, has a lot going for him.”

“Thank you.”

“There is one slight difficulty. I wish he would learn to focus.”

This perplexed Mom, whose furrowed brow Mrs. Smith could nearly see through the phone.

“Focus on what?”

“The important things.”

“Such as?”

“His teacher, his future, life, liberty, and the pursuit of Shakespeare.”

Mom, always super frank, asked, “Is this a crank call?”

She was not the only mother in Connecticut who received phone calls from Mrs. Smith.

But Donald perfectly understood Mrs. Smith. He was a willful, stubborn, dreamy boy, easily distracted, whose saving grace was a sometimes searing sense of humor.

Having noticed that Mrs. Smith had marked several of his papers and book reports with an A over an F, he one day worked up the courage to ask Mrs. Smith what the marking meant.

“The A is for substance,” she said, “the F for presentation, which of course includes misspellings and grammatical errors. I’ve also noticed that you’ve fallen into the bad habit of mispronouncing in oral presentations the word ‘because.’ You say, incorrectly, BEKUZ. But the word should be pronounced BE-CAUSE, as in ‘the cause of.”

She continued, smiling all the while, “I would advise you to read that essay of Karl Kraus’ that says the fate of humankind may well depend upon the placement of a comma.”

Her mild reproach hit Donald between the eyes, as if she had smashed him with a pickaxe, after which – with some help from his father -- he began willingly to focus.

Many years after graduation from a small “teacher’s college,” as it was then known, I wrote Mrs. Smith a tardy note thanking her for her attentions: “Perhaps you do not remember me. You were my best and most challenging teacher. When I arrived at college, I was well prepared for courses and professors far less tough than you, and over the years have written political columns for various newspapers. I am perhaps the only columnist in Connecticut who is well-versed in Karl Kraus.

 Mrs. Smith replied, “Thank you, Mr. Pesci, for your kind note. It pleased me to notice that your spelling and grammar were perfect.”

In 1967, still in college, I married a woman very much like Mrs. Smith.

Andree Pesci graduated not certified to teach. This was a problem. She was legally blind from birth, and administrators thought she could not teach in public schools for this reason. She applied for help to then Governor John Dempsey in overriding the college administrators’ apparently irreversible decision.

Famous, even today, for her disquisitions, Andrée Pesci (nee Descheneaux) explained in vivid, entertaining detail that her college expenses – including books and readers – had been paid by Connecticut’s Lions Club, which had a soft spot in its large heart for the visually impaired; and while in college, she was at the head of her class in all subjects. Among her varied accomplishments, she had directed plays and was a master in her fencing class.

The governor, who had a soft spot in his heart for the Lions Club, was impressed but wrote back, regretfully, there was nothing he could do to override a decision made by college administrators.

Undeterred and set on showing that she could successfully teach students, she was hired to teach English at Saint Mary’s Girls School in Greenwich, Connecticut. She taught there for two years, and wrote again to Dempsey, receiving the same reply.

Then she taught for a year at a Catholic High School in Stamford, and kept the governor abreast. He wrote back – sorry, very sorry, nothing could be done.

She then went on to receive a master’s Degree in American Studies, a fairly new discipline, at Fairfield University and – as the reader will have guessed by now – shared the glad tiding with Dempsey, who waited a week to respond, in a very short note, “Andrée, you win.”

State certification in hand, she was hired almost immediately by Ridgefield High School, where she taught for several years. Few of her students knew she was blind because intellectually brilliant disabled people are adept at hiding their disabilities, and she was raised in a household in which her mother refused to make accommodations or sundering distinctions between her children.

Years after she had left teaching, she received a note from one of her students, now a successful lawyer, that said he was not her best student, but her manner of teaching, always enlivening and masterful, and her insistence that her students should fearlessly embrace their responsibilities, has stood him in good stead.

“I have homeschooled all my children,” he said