Miss Marsh

The year begins in autumn, as far as I'm concerned, with the opening of school, a feeling that has persisted long after I ceased being either a student or a teacher. I could never see the point of beginning the year in January, when you're in the midst of your normal activities and the world is frozen. March or April would be a more reasonable time, at least in the northern hemisphere, since that's when the earth begins to bloom, but by then the school year is more than half over. I guess my year is only ten months long, from September to June.

My formal education began in the first grade, without benefit of first having attended nursery school or kindergarten. At the age of five, I was too young perhaps to notice the season, but I did notice the heavy rain that mesmerized me as I looked at it through my classroom's three long windows. What I remember most vividly from that first year is my teacher, Miss Marsh. She was stern, unsmiling, and tall, although of course when I was five years old most grownups seemed tall to me.

The first lesson she taught me was the importance of listening to instructions. At the end of one school day, when I failed to get up from my desk and retrieve my coat, as all the other pupils were doing, she slapped me. I truly hadn't heard her, dreamy boy that I was, wrapped in my own world. It probably wasn't a hard slap, more like a tap, but it shocked me as much as if she had punched me in the nose. If I had gone to kindergarten first, I would have learned to listen to what the teacher was saying. Miss Marsh never again had to slap me, but even now I wonder what heights I might have ascended had I only gone to kindergarten.

At the end of the first term, Miss Marsh gave each of us a report card. I didn't know what it was other than something important to give to my mother. As I left the school grounds, some big girls asked me to show it to them. When I did so, they gasped. So did my mother when she read it. As a result, she kept me out of school for two weeks and taught me to read, a procedure she subsequently followed with my brother and sister when they began their schooling. After I returned to Miss Marsh, she moved me into the highest reading group, a vindication of my mother's efforts and my first and perhaps greatest academic triumph.

The building in which Miss Marsh reigned no longer stands. A few years ago, we met a teacher from that school. She told us that she took her class to the demolition site as an exercise in archeological discovery. Among the treasures that the children uncovered was linoleum, whose purpose she had to explain.

Dear Miss Marsh, I suppose you've gone the way of the linoleum, but I wish I could see you one more time. I'd thank you for having taught me the importance of listening to instructions and for having been honest in your assignment of grades, and I'd have a chance to see if you really were so stern, unsmiling, and tall.