Good and Bad Teachers 2

One of the best (if not THE best) teachers I ever had was Mrs. Griffith in Third Grade.

She was strict and old fashioned, but I felt safe in her class and learned a lot from her. 

The parents of many of my classmates had also been her students because she’d been teaching for years. 

In our old school building the other classrooms had modern tables and chairs or desks for the students, but in her class our desks were still the ones with wrought-iron curly sides and holes for ink bottles on top, and the desks were bolted to the floor in straight lines.

We had ink bottles in those holes and yellow, wooden pens with the old fashioned nubs. Fountain pens were fairly new and ball-point pens hadn’t been invented yet.  She taught us how to write with those pens and ink. 

Every day after lunch Mrs. Griffith would read to us from a classic children’s book, one chapter at a time. 

All credentialed teachers were required to know how to play the piano back then. Like the others in our school, our teacher would play the one in our classroom as we sang along.

Today she would be fired or arrested for some of the things she did, but times were different back in the 1940s. 

No child was allowed to enter her room in the morning without a hug. That helped us know she loved us, but it would be considered molestation today.

And I remember her becoming angry with a student for writing “Merry Xmas.” She told him sternly, “Never replace the name of Christ with an X!” Of course she didn’t know the X symbolized the cross and had been how Christians identified each other in centuries past. Teachers can’t mention religion in public schools today.

Years later when I was in my 20s and working at California School for the Deaf I realized what an excellent teacher she had been and wrote her a thank you note about that. She never wrote back.

One day, quite a few years later, my mother told me something I’d written was in the report from the Superintendent of Schools that was mailed to everyone in Marin County. It was the letter I had written to Mrs. Griffith. It had meant so much to her that she’d kept it for the rest of her life and it was published with her obituary.