school – Penguin Scott

Photo: Albany bulb artwork by Penguin Scott

The year was 1981 and I was in seventh grade. Paul Revere Middle School had just opened for seventh and eighth graders. In fact, during the first few weeks of classes, there were still a few minor construction projects still under way.

Yet, for being a brand new school, it had a rough quality to it. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that at my previous school, the elementary, my class of several hundred sixth-graders were at the top of the food chain and had no negative influences reigning down on them, whereas the eighth-graders had come from a middle school in a rougher part of Houston, where they had different values of behavior. Being in a new building was nice, but I didn’t like the energy of the other students.

I was assigned a class to learn Spanish. The room was located on the second floor of the new school, near the front of the building. The newly-scrawled graffiti was a bit more prevalent in this part of the school, which I thought was odd since it was closer to the principal’s office. I largely ignored the graffiti, in part because I didn’t understand what much of it meant.

The thought of learning Spanish intrigued me, so I was at first eager to take part in the curriculum. Walking into the room, I found a seat near the center of the room and laid eyes on Mrs. Sanders. I knew it was Mrs. Sanders because her name was written on the green chalkboard at the front of the room. The lettering was exquisite. I don’t know that I’d ever seen a teacher with such nice chalkboard script.

To my young eyes, Mrs. Sanders seemed to be a hundred years old. Round spectacles hung on her tiny nose, which was framed by wrinkled cheeks and a forehead full of horizontal lines etched deep in her skin. She had to be older than my grandparents and I wondered if she’d still be alive by the end of the semester.

Her hair stood high and rounded from being teased, and apparently had been dyed, as she had roots of a slightly lighter color with some grey evident throughout. Skinny legs seemed to dangle from beneath her blue polyester skirt and on her feet were wimple and sturdy low-heeled sandals, like any typical person of her age might wear, with a large gold buckle and squared fronts. Her bony arms formed points at either side of her body, with its bulging tummy, as she listened to a student with her hands rested on her hips.

As she listened to the girl speaking to her, her brown eyes would squint, seemingly to better concentrate on what was being said. This created more wrinkles on her face, which seemed very unnecessary to me!

When she spoke, she did so with an old, gravelly voice. She had no accent, which I think I expected from someone about to teach me Spanish. But she spoke with a careful consideration of what she was saying, deliberate in her pronunciation and sure to be understood so as not to need to repeat herself. And I would come to find that she had a habit of looking downward towards the end of her sentences, as if she was looking down on the person being spoken to.

The room quickly filled and the new-styled electronic horn sounded , announcing the start of class. It would take some time getting used to hearing this horrid dual-toned beep after hearing bells for so many years.

I said a quick hello to Tim and Bill, friends of mine who sat in nearby seats. Our rectangle desks with their storage shelf just under the simulated wood grained tops were arranged in five rows of six desks in each row. I put the books from my other classes in the wire shelf and readied my notebook for class.

Mrs. Sanders started class by saying something in Espanol, and then followed with the English translation. Nothing like feeling lost in a class from the fist words out of the instructor’s mouth. It’s a feeling that would not be replicated again until I would reach college, when I enrolled in algebra! Carrie, who sat just behind me seemed to understand, though. She showed off by giving a little laugh after the teacher’s opening statement and before the translation.

Her first order of business was to rearrange the class in our seats according to a diagram she had already made. This was so she could better remember our names, as she could easily look to it and match the child with the corresponding box, which represented the seat the child sat in. But it was because she was too old to remember us any other way. My name came towards the end of the list, so I lost my nice seat near the center of the room and was now in the row furthest from the door and near the back of the room.

Mrs. Sanders’ next duty was to assign us all the Spanish equivalent of our Americanized names. I started to get excited at this prospect. I wondered what my name in Spanish would be. I liked my name, but it didn’t seem to have much flair. I did like that it was not a too common name. But after hearing it for so many years, I liked the idea of hearing something new for a while.

My friend Tim, while within the four walls of this room for the rest of the semester, would be known as Timmy-TAY-oh. Neat. Linda was now Leenda. Here, Mrs. Sanders took a moment to comment that her name meant “beautiful”. I like that, since that is also the name of my mother. John was assigned to be Juan. George became Hor-hay, there was Carmen, Rosa, Tow-mahs and I loved how Bill became Guiermo.

This was so exciting. What wonderful names. We were to use these names at all times during this class. My turn was coming up, she’d gone through almost the entire class. I sat up a little higher in my seat and presented a good, clean image to the ancient one. She got to me, first looking down at her list for my name. She looked up, hardly giving thought of my new name much consideration . Her lips parted and air from within her old, wrinkled lungs pushed through her vocal chords and they produced my very own name, as I’ve heard millions of times before, but only now with a slight accent over the O, coming out rhyming like something between hot and scoot. I could hear Leenda snicker.

And just like that she moved on to the next student and for an hour each day I would simply be called, Skoht. I slumped back down a bit, the smile from my face faded, my anticipation dashed. I hated Mrs. Sanders. And Leenda, too!

The class would be fun at times; trying at others. During the year we had a few celebrations, even going outside to finally burst the piñata that had been hanging in the class all semester. We had a field trip to a flamenco guitar concert and visited a Mexican bakery. Mrs. Sanders taught us to conjugate verbs, how the language had masculine and feminine words, and I became very good at the pronunciation of the words of the language.

But I never really came to like Mrs. Sanders. I don’t think it was the way in which she carelessly threw out my name with an accent on our first day, nor was it the fact that she was a small, scrawny ancient woman. She was an abrupt woman. She was very strict when it came to her familiarity with her routine. We were often required to state classroom answers “en Espanol”. I was a slow learner and not very motivated. She was constantly calling me out on my lack to answer in Spanish to the ability that she thought I should have.

However, after all these years, twenty-eight, to be exact, I now see that Mrs. Sanders was actually a wonderful teacher and a nice woman. I still think about her when, for fun, I will read a paragraph in Spanish with the proper pronunciation. I don’t know what the words mean, but I know how to say them.

I now appreciate her routines. I see that she was not yelling at me or talking down to me, but that she was pushing me to become a better student. But I was too busy learning the bad habits of the adolescents who shared the halls of Paul Revere; who had a rougher upbringing than that of mine.

Surely she’s expired by now, or in a state that she’d certainly never remember me. But I’ll never forget that class, that meticulous old woman, and the way she would call my name…Skhot.

When I was eight I lived on Creekbend Dr. in the southeast side of Houston. At one end of Creekbend was a park; I lived at the other end. To find the house that I lived in, head up the long first block, then cross a street, which ended at Creekbend. Ours was the brick house with brown trim, second from the corner of the second block.

Other than the community swimming pool, the park at the end of our street wasn’t necessarily the fun kind of park, with swings, trees and such. It was just an open, grassy area with a few basic baseball diamonds and plenty of room for a football or soccer game. And at the opposite end of the park from the street on which I lived was the elementary school at which I attended third grade.

Thinking back on those days has always given me warm feelings. I’ve often felt that the time I spent in third grade was my favorite time in life. The oppressive Houston heat never bothered me then. I had a yellow Schwinn bicycle that I loved to ride. I was active in Cub Scouts and played soccer. I enjoyed school and remember many of the things I learned back then to this day. In fact, I seem to remember more of the things I learned in the third grade than any other grades. I’m not saying I didn’t learn much outside of third grade; after all, I did graduate high school with honors. But the things I learned when I lived on Creekbend have always stuck with me.

It was in third grade that I learned such things as the basics of geography and of the four directions. I also learned the basics of astronomy, which in college would be my favorite subject, along with history. It was in the third grade where I first learned about the concept of time, and how we would be reaching the year 2000, when I would be 32. I got my first wrist watch during this time; it was a racecar watch; a gift from my grandparents.

Every day, after school I would play with Robert, my best friend who lived two houses up from me. We used to watch TV shows and make tin foil boats to float in make believe rivers flowing through worlds created in the sandbox in his back yard. He and I created a language of code that no one else could understand and we often found ourselves playing in the hills of construction dirt, hiding behind them as we threw dirt clumps and small rocks at one another–war. Star Wars was our favorite movie and my C-3PO impression kept all the kids laughing. And it was during the third grade that my brother was born. Ah, Creekbend- so many great memories. I even convinced a dim neighborhood kid that I was from Pluto when he asked where I had come from after jumping out of a tree just behind him. Good times.

Since we lived so close, I would walk to school each day. It wasn’t far at all, but back then, to a nine-year old, it sure seemed to be. Parker Elementary was shaped like an E, with three wings extending from a main wing with the cafeteria and auditorium near the bottom wing of the E. My classroom was at the end of the hall and looked into the courtyard between the top wing of the E and the center. In command of this square room was Mrs. Booker, our teacher.

Mrs. Booker was a short-thick woman with light colored hair. Thinking back on her now, she was probably in her thirties. The one thing that always stands out to me about her was the way she wore her sweaters. Her bosom was ample and the sweaters were tight. She used a wooden pointing stick and at times, like when waiting for a student to give her an answer, she would bounce it off of the stretched material between her breasts. The stick would bounce back and forth- to and fro. She used the resilient force of her sweater to bring the stick forward and let it fall back again on its own, keeping me mesmerized as she did this. There were times she didn’t have her stick, but instead a ruler. But just as with the stick, Mrs. Booker would bounce that ruler on the sweater between her breasts, oblivious to the amazement going on in my head at the sight.

I loved Mrs. Booker – and no, not for the sweater trick. I loved her for the things she taught me. One day I did poorly on a spelling test. After she passed the results back to the students, she came around to go over them with most of us. One of the words I missed was “creek”. When she reached my desk she pointed this out to me with the question: how could I miss that word when I lived on Creekbend?

At first I was amazed that she knew the street on which I lived. But what she had just done was helped me realize how the world, or learning, was inter-connected. It hadn’t dawned on me to utilize my knowledge of spelling my street’s name to figure out how to spell creek. There were numerous resources at my finger tips. I was now on the path to super genius status thanks to one question from my third grade teacher.

When I think back on Mrs. Booker, it’s not for this that I most remember her, however. That was but a small example of the impression she left on me. It’s not for teaching me east from west, nor for her role as teacher during what I now call my great brain expansion. What I remember her for, more than anything else, was opening my eyes to color. Not the spectrum of color, but in people- skin color.

During what I must now presume was February, since that’s Black History Month, I recall Mrs. Booker getting us all quiet and settled down one afternoon and she started telling us about black people. She said many had been brought from Africa and been enslaved. She said blacks had endured many hardships living in America, but since the late sixties, had come a long way in gaining equal rights. But then she got more serious, her eyes squinting and her head moving closer to us, and she said there was still a long way to go.

For the first time since I’d met her, I saw that Mrs. Booker was a black woman. I looked around the room at my classmates and saw that some of them were also black. Others, I realized, were brown. And at the front of the class, my black teacher then thrust her left arm towards us and with her right hand showed us that the color of her skin doesn’t rub off. I thought this was silly, and had she not been so stern-looking, I might have let slip a laugh; the thought of skin color rubbing off. But the image was one that kept with me for many years.

That day, as I walked down Creekbend Dr. on my way home, I studied the people I passed to see who was white and who was black. Then I started to remember people in my past, friends of my mom and the bus driver at my previous school, who were black. I had never noticed.

I recalled my paternal grandparents, who grew up in the Texas Hill County, referring to some people as colored, or as worse. Those terms would never again sit well with me. I understood about prejudice being in the world without even having to study it. Not to say that my grandparent’s were necessarily prejudiced. They grew up in a world where that is simply what they called black people. I never recall them saying anything untoward of a black person. They used the terms as they would to call someone a German or a farmer or a bus driver…colored.

As I got older I could see the prejudice others had towards people who were different from them all around me. And it wasn’t just directed towards blacks; Jews, hicks, Asians, Muslims, anyone different. And as I was witness to it, I would often study it, much like a dog might study a new person in their midst. I wanted to better understand how people could feel a certain way about a group of others without any sound reason. As you can see, before Mrs. Booker, it was quite foreign to me.

What I found, especially in my friends or acquaintances, was that it appeared to be passed down from their parents. Mom never allowed me to judge a book by its cover. I was taught to look things up when I went to her with questions; to be independent and free-thinking. So I realized how fortunate I was not to have picked up bigotry from my home, as so many others around me had.

So I’m quite proud that it took my third grade teacher to open my eyes to skin tones and prejudice. It’s not something I learned at home. And for that I thank my mother…and Mrs. Booker.