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| 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
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