Oh, what will I tell you about; there are so many                                                       things I could tell you about being in the North                                                         and the size of the geese gaggles before they break                                                 into smaller groups.  If you’ve never been in the                                                         North, you have no idea of the massive sound they                                                   make in the quiet North.  I could tell you about the                                                     characters, like Miss Campbell, who managed to fool everybody and at about 80, submit her sister’s teaching certificate and get hired.  The kids said she was “death warmed over.”

      Or, I could tell you about my first next  room over teacher who swore that there were three sexes according to the kids, men, women and teachers—and teachers never needed to go to the bathroom.  

     I could even tell you about the morning after visiting and sleeping over at my parents’ in Slave Lake, we had to fly four hundred miles back in time for me to teach.  The north was socked in, and we had to sneak in just above the only highway in order to get me back in time for school that morning. It’s quite a thing to look up from a flying airplane at the treetops.  My, oh my, Gerald and I were crazy back then.  As we drive back and forth in snowstorms in a 26-hour straight span from Palm Springs each winter, many still call us crazy.

      But I am going to tell you about my first discipline lesson.  I was lucky enough to be plucked straight out of university to teach in Edmonton.  I was even luckier to start drawing my first paycheck in May.  Edmonton back then had an intern program to give its new teachers a chance to practice before the school year began.  I didn’t realize I was indenturing myself to slavery.  You know how it goes.  You do all the work and teacher so and so, does nothing—or at least it seems that way. 

      I was teaching junior high math and science.  One of the kids was giving me trouble—not huge, but always answering with out waiting to be called on and dominating the class before anyone else had a chance to think and answer.  He and I had already sat together through a few detentions.  When, my supervising teacher, a great hulk of a man in about his 30’s—ancient to me at only 19 and 110 #’s, decided to give me a ‘how to deal out effective discipline’ lesson.

      He told the kid and I to follow him.  We went into this small office with an old wooden teacher’s desk, opened the drawer and pulled out two straps.  Highlands in Edmonton was a 1 through 9 school.  He picked up the small strap and slapped it against a palm and casually said, “This strap hurts a lot, but this is for the small kids.”  He then took out the great big strap, much thicker and much wider and said,  “This is for you.  I need to get warmed up.”  With that he took a huge wind-up and banged it down on the desk.  I swear the desk rose several inches, dust flew and papers rose, scattered and resettled. 

      He took the boys hand and said, “I need to work your hand over so this really hurts.  He began kneading the hand.  He did this for a few minutes.  The poor kid was shaking and eyeing the huge strap lying there.  He was a slight boy, academic a bit preppy or maybe even dorky. 

      As he let go of the hand and picked up the strap, the teacher said, “Now that should hurt lots.” 

      This time he took an even huger wind up.  Tears were starting to flow.  He came down missing the hand and cracked the desk even harder than before.  The kid was bawling now.  My self-appointed disciplinarian instructor boomed out.  “Get out of here, I never want to see you in here again.  I don’t strap smart kids.” 

 I did use the strap once on a couple of grade eighters who beat up one of my grade sevener’s little first grade brother.  I remember asking Mike, my student, “Why didn’t you protect your brother?”  He said, “I would have gotten the strap for fighting.”  I replied, “Mike, there are some things in this world that are worth getting the strap for.” 

Aah, to be 20 again.

Chalkdust by Elaine Dufresne part 2

                                                        MIKE
 
Last time I was honored to present the Chalkdust Memory I told you about a very unique discipline lesson I had when I was an intern teacher.  In a sense, this is a continuation. 
 
I still remember his name.  Mike.  Maybe, because he belonged to my fist class, grade seven.   Mike was brilliant, bordering on genius, and most of all a really swell kid in every way, but then so were most of the students in that class at Grandview Heights, a new ultra rich area in Edmonton loaded with  children of university profs, doctors, other wealthy people, and foreign consular ambassadors, (yes, Alberta did have its own ambassadors.)
Mike was really big and plump for his age, but he did everything whole-heartedly. 

He wasn’t the most athletic, but if a ball came within his reach, he’d hold on, even if he toppled over. 
 
Mike had a little brother in grade one and his brother wasn’t just plump, he was seriously overweight. 
One day, Mr. Penny, my principal, was gone for a meeting. Mike came in and said that 2 grade eight boys had beaten up his brother as they were walking to school.  I looked at big strong Mike and said,  “Why didn’t you stop them?”
 
His reply, “I’d get the strap for fighting.”
 
Being only 21, and full of the bravery of youth, and an innate sense of justice, (that still remains with me today),
I looked at Mike and said, “Mike there are some things in this world that are worth getting the strap for.”
 
Then I hauled the two grade eighters in and showed them the two straps, one for Elementary and one for Junior High.
I over emphasized how much more the bigger strap would hurt, demonstrating by wailing on the desk and making it dance. 
Then on upstretched palms, putting all my fury, on the downward swing I strapped the boys.  I’d learned that discipline lesson I had received as an intern teacher. 
 
I promise my next story won’t be about the strap.  I won’t let my feisty Scottish heritage always dominate.
My ultra pacifist Mennonite side will show through next time.
 
I leave you with this moral, a warning to us teachers: 
 
Be careful what we teach, because it will be acted out in the lives of our students.

​

Elaine Dufresne 3           Miss C

The land of the midnight sun beckons strange characters and none stranger than Miss C.  Secretly ancient, pretending to be 60, she surreptitiously found her way north.  Why?  Who knows? All anyone knew about her was what they saw, and when she came to teach at my school, miles out in the bush, I perhaps, saw more than most. The first time I saw her she came to borrow my can opener. She sterilized it and the tin of food before prying the lid off.  Odd, but wait, odder is coming.

She had a teaching certificate or should I say number. Boy, could her Grade Two class march!  They scrubbed and cleaned their classroom.  They marched to the bathrooms to wash their hands; they marched back to the classroom and laid out their lunches on freshly scrubbed desks.  As well trained, as they were to march, they were just as well trained to sit patiently and wait, lunches displayed before them, as this ‘teacher,’ Miss Cwalked the aisles and said, “Mmmm!  This looks good.”  The students watched as she stole their choicest morsels.  At home, she always sterilized tins before opening them.  At school she picked and nibbled food prepared in homes, some without electricity, most without running water and many of dubious cleanliness.

One day, Miss C invited me next door, into her teacherage.  She took out an elaborate photo album and proudly shared a set of professional dilettante pictures.  She explained they were taken in New York when she was a model.  I had no reason to doubt the pictures were of her, even though they looked as if they were taken in the 1920’s.  The pictures were finished in a beautiful matte and despite being black and white, they glowed with more life and vitality than any color photo could.  That photographer had to have been the finest in New York. In the photos, she looked beautiful; hair perfectly finger waved like a long-ago silent film star.  Dress shimmery and falling gently, loosely, with ropes of pearls dangling from her neck, ready to be flung as she strutted a rowdy Charleston, at the trendiest speakeasy in Manhattan.   Now lonely and old, Miss C nightly roamed the corridors of the school, across the road from the teacherages.  She roamed the halls in the new section, the ones where a construction crew of men lived.  She claimed she could only get a good shower over there.  The frail, white, ancient spectre of Miss C’s body only unnerved the men. Soon Miss C was banished from her grade two classroom and while the proceedings were in motion to declare her unfit to teach, she was retained on salary. They made a position for her in the library.  She also was asked to supervise the high school girls as they made their weekly bus trek, across the river to the Home-Ec labs in Fort Vermillion.  One fateful bus ride home, Miss C proceeded to prance and model her apparel in the aisles of the bus.  She smoothed her skirt flat across her protruding skinny hipbones, and then slid her hands caressingly down the length of her thigh.  “See my skirt.  It’s pure cashmere wool and cost $200.”  She should have stopped there, but no, she lifted her treasured skirt and said, “See my slip.  That’s hand-made lace.  My panties match.”  Lifting the slip, she said, “See this girdle, it was bought at Macy’s in New York City.”  Extending her silk clad leg she proceeded to model how straight the black seam was.  The teenagers did not appreciate that they had just been asked to walk back across a bridge into history, to a time when fine undies where sold in boxes and delicately wrapped in tissue paper.  They did not appreciate that the seam up the back of the leg was a look only the fortunate few could afford.  When the bus returned, they ran to me and related the tale, vehemently exclaiming, “She looks like death warmed over.” Oh no!!  It has just hit me that those old school busses had a chrome pole.  Maybe I just discovered Miss C’s secret.  Please Miss C, tell me that you were not a pole swinger in New York City. 
 
Miss C conned a year’s salary out of the school board before they discovered she did not have a teaching certificate.  She had stolen the number off her much younger sister’s certificate.  The assistant superintend lamented to me, “What really hurt, was how very old she was.”