I’ve had some pretty weird teachers in my time.  My earliest memory is of a Miss Babbit in kindergarten in Kew Garden Hills.  It’s a miracle she didn’t put a permanent end to my creativity.  It all began when she asked the class to color in oval wooden picture frames.  I made mine cerulean blue and decided to jazz it up with crimson stripes, very neat and evenly spaced.  Pretty good for a five-year-old.  The other children obediently towed the line and delivered monochrome picture frames.  When I proudly turned mine in, Miss Babbit broke it in half and snarled, “Did I tell you to put lines on it?” 

No.  No, she didn’t.  What a biatch. I understand she eventually got thrown out of the school district when irate parents complained about her depraved behavior toward children.

Our neighborhood in Queens was tough in general (I came close to death there on several occasions).  It was the kind of neighborhood where if you went trick-or-treating, someone was likely to say, “Trick,” and that ended up being a bad thing.  It was the kind of neighborhood where you were sexually assaulted at three and four, nearly kidnapped at five (Hey – the guy with the long coat and fedora seemed to be a reasonable guy to walk home from school with) and frequently pummeled at all ages.  So, between the teachers and the general population, we really needed to get the hell out of there. 

Then we moved to Long Island, where I attended Center Street School, right across the street from my house.  I had a group of great teachers there – Miss Jean Goger, Miss Poons, Ruth C. Hess, MaryLou Gannon (nee Dunham) and Mrs. Martha DeSilva, in addition to various music, art and physical education teachers who made an impression on me.

Unfortunately, after years of having to live defensively, I started my years at Center Street as a bit of a bully.  One of my greatest shames was scratching a girl twice my age with developmental disabilities for copying one of my pictures.  My first grade teacher, Miss Goger, set me straight in a minute.  She kept me after class and showed me her long, red talons.  She said, “When I get upset with you, do I scratch you?”  Well, since she had nails like Wolverine, I would certainly hope not.  I just had blunt little girl nails, but Miss Goger made her point. 

I still continued to be a little tough but I never hurt anybody again.  I did feel like a boy until I was around 12 – even though I had breasts by the time I was nine (no, I never needed a training bra – my boobs always knew exactly what they were doing).  At any rate, a boy named Joey Goldman knocked me gently on my ass when we were in the sixth grade and that was the end of my fighting career.

Getting back to the teachers, Miss Poons was my second grade teacher and I don’t have much memory of her excepts that I got a kick out of her name.  Ruth C. Hesse (it’s amazing how you recall the full appellations of some teachers) used to refer to herself as “an old battle-axe” but, man, she was a good teacher.  Mary Lou Dunham, who became Mary Lou Gannon (and, now, something else entirely) was tall and had straight auburn hair and she told me to come see her about  studying art at New Paltz when I was ready to graduate from high school.  I never did, though.  Nevertheless, she was kind enough to make me believe I had some artistic talent (which was something, considering my experience with Miss Babbit).

I had Mrs. DeSilva in fifth and sixth grade and she was my real hero because she was the one who recognized that, somewhere between those grades, I went from looking like a normal child to looking like a 25-year-old woman.  She used to keep me after class to counsel me because, over a single summer I went from being popular to being the one to keep out of the spin-the-bottle closet.  I was tall.  I was mature.  And I had boobs.  Big ones.  Bad combo for a sixth grader.  Mrs. DeSilva preserved my mental health (along with my classmate, Joyce Barnathan, who kindly observed, “You’re going through a rough patch but you’re still one of the in crowd.”  I will never forget her for that.).

I didn’t have too many problems with my teachers at Center Street – except that the boys’ gym teacher, Mr. Shocket, accused me of being “fresh” when I refused to do the Virginia Reel.  Years later, we played squash together and got along just fine.

Middle school at Herricks Junior High was pretty rough – for everybody.  I mean, who doesn’t have problems in junior high?  One day, I was late for class.  The boy’s basketball coach, “Jackrabbit” Jones, caught me running up the down staircase. He told me to find the up staircase.  I kid you not. There wasn’t another soul in sight.  I told him to forget it, or something to that effect. He also thought I was fresh (what can I tell you – male gym teachers brought out the devil in me) so he told me to write him a 500-word essay on why I shouldn’t go up the down staircase.  I said, “Get real, Jackrabbit.”  So, he raised the word count to 1,000.  I refused, so he hauled me down to the principal’s office. I explained the situation to the principal and he told me to go to class – using whichever staircase I wished. 

I had another very strange teacher named Elsie Eels.  Mrs. Eels was traumatized by the death of her son, probably in Vietnam (or, considering her age, in Korea).  She wore one earring to commemorate her fallen child (word had it that the first thing she did when she got the bad news was put her hand to her ear) and kept a stack of rocks on the passenger side of her car (presumably, to keep her balanced).  She gave the class an assignment to draw a map, I forget of what.  I worked like mad on that map and produced a work of art.  She gave me an F because she thought I drew a river going upstream.  I wadded up the map and threw it at her saying, “You have some nerve,” after which she gave me an A.  (Okay – unreasonable teachers of all types brought out the devil in me, even sweet ones like Elsie Eels.)

I also remember Alvin Muller who used to throw desks at students at Center Street (back in my brother’s day, it was only erasers – his tolerance for misbehaving pre-adolescents was clearing slipping); and a music teacher, Imogene Gates, also at Center Street, who used to say, “Damnit, kids – don’t you want to have some fun?”; and an art teacher, Miss Johnson, who would never have broken my picture frame in half, even if I had painted kangaroos on it; and Miss Pizarro, who used to sing, “Las Perlas de Tu Boca”, which was a very sexy song to sing to a class of hormonal junior high students (although we loved it);  and Raul Chibas, another Spanish teacher who was a former Cuban military leader; and Scott Finegan who was a Social Studies teacher and all-around good guy who died recently.

Surely, my most influential teachers at Herricks High School were Oscar U. Ledesma, yet another Spanish teacher; Michael Carbone, my humanities teacher; Ernie Gerung, my math teacher; and Ron Demaio, my English and drama teacher and, eventually, dear friend (after all, he was only six years my senior).

Dr. Ledesma tolerated my clownish behavior and excused it by saying, “Mimi is in love.”  (Mimi was my Spanish name);  I got Michael Carbone and an entire class thrown out of Philharmonic Hall by cracking everybody up over a Shostakovich piece (it sounded like Godzilla was stomping his way through the auditorium); I wrote my college essay about Ernie Gerung who taught me: “First, you gotta learn how to talk to yourself;  then you gotta hear what you say; then you gotta do what you say.”  A good lesson in life.  And the essay I wrote about him got me into Brandeis when my SAT scores probably wouldn’t have. 

And, finally, the inspirational and hilarious Ron Demaio who gave me a chance to act (comedically, of course) and who got my creative juices flowing.  I remember him taking my class on an amazing field trip to New York City where he rented out an entire powder blue theater for an exclusive viewing of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  How magical.  He also gave me a taste of my first (and last) oyster (“Tastes just like an eyeball, doesn’t it?” “Yes! Yes, it does!  Please pass the shrimp.)

And then there were those phys. ed. teachers, who used to make me climb ropes when I was having my period and bleeding copiously.  I’ll bet those teachers never even had a period. 

So, what is the meaning of all this?

In my life, I became a writer and an artist (in addition to my long career in marketing communications). When I went to college, I was originally a theater major but lacked the confidence to continue with it (maybe I should take it up now!). I earned my degrees in psychology and fine arts and later studied journalism and radio news on a graduate level at Harvard.  (Yeah!) And it’s  a good thing I speak Spanish because I ended up in Santa Fe, NM (not that it didn’t come in handy in Atlanta and Boston and New York).  

I honor all my teachers – except for Miss Babbit, who had no business teaching young children.   And I’m delighted that I ended up in the Herricks School District because I think it was one of the best educations I could have gotten on Long Island.  And further, as much as Facebook is maligned, I’m glad it has reconnected me with so many classmates and teachers that may have otherwise gotten lost in time.