Teachers! They serve a great purpose of molding our young minds, stretching our imaginations and guiding us on our road to knowledge...and in my case, I will go one step further...to scare the living CRAP out of me! Most normal people remember their teachers from high school, and maybe they might remember those from elementary school. You all know that MOI am not normal; I remember EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!!!
Kindergarten. Mrs. Gayle. Sweet lady I am sure, when she was sleeping! I remember the first day of school not going over so well with me. There I was, in my school uniform, trottling off to school with my mother, and then, to be handed off to a lady whose face I will never forget. She reminded me of a Mennonite oma, but bronzed. She had the joy of the Lord in her. This means for those of you non-church folk that she had the look of constipation on her face ALL the time! NOTHING I ever did was good enough for this lady. If I coloured anywhere outside the lines, which I tended to do, I would be slapped, or somehow my work would not make it on the board. I endured her, and this was going to be the pattern of my existence in preparatory school!
Intermediate. Mrs. Daley. Now she was the NICEST teacher I ever had! She sort of reminded me of Mary Poppins but without the talking umbrella! She was always well dressed and well spoken. She was a proper Bermudan-British lady to whom I attribute my ability to speak the Queen's English (outside of my parents' teaching as well). We had a piano in our class room and on Fridays, she would go to the piano and teach us songs. She made learning fun! Then (*insert loud minor key music here*), she went on leave, and was replaced by her total antithesis! Mrs. McGunn! She did NOT play the piano and her way of controlling us and getting our attention was by intimidation and threatening...and it worked! She had us all cowering in fear and squealing for our mommies after the first day! I was convinced that she had it in for me and for a few others in the class. She always picked on me and accused me of being lazy. One day, I was just not understanding what she wanted me to do, and because I was not doing it, she would hit me with a ruler she was armed with. To make the time pass, I would ask to go to the bathroom or for a drink of water by the cooler and take my time to make the time pass by quicker. I thought my troubles were done after that class.
Grade One. No such luck! Mrs. Thames (as in the River Thames). She seemed nice enough at first, but then it became apparent that all the teachers in the school seemed to be conspiring against me and were all out to get me! NOTHING I did was good enough for this lady. I remember once getting my homework all correct, but because it was untidy, she said it was too messy to give a star for the full marks I had gotten. I was too slow in class, never finished my work on time, always forced to miss recess because work was not done in time, my hand writing was always too messy and too big, and she even threatened to send me off to the special class. In short, I was stupid. I even remember one day, she scared me so badly that I wet myself in my seat. I could have sworn I saw fangs in her mouth! I don't know how, but I made it to...
Grade Two! Miss Little. On the first day, I caught my former grade one teacher whispering to her that I was a lazy student. I was just glad I was done with her! I gave her the evil look as she turned on her heels and left. Miss Little was a nice teacher, even though she had a bit of a temper. She was the most creative teacher I ever had. I remember when we would work on our projects for Open Day (which was a day in schools across Jamaica where each class picked a theme and did a project and the school would be open all day to parents to come in and view the projects and a winner would be picked from all the works presented). Usually, she would let us go home without homework on Fridays, but not always. Anyway, our project was based on people in our community and we made people like firemen and women, nurses, teachers, etc, out of papier machee. Needless to say, we won!!!
Grade Three. Mrs. Blacktree. I found that I was able to read this lady's facial expressions and know what kind of a day she was having. Whenever she had pursed lips, she was having a bad day and you were to be on your P's and Q's. Whenever she smiled, you were really in trouble!!! She introduced us to some new concepts. Pop quizzes, public readings and my least favourite, spankings for failing tests! Anytime there was a math test, I made up my mind to submit to being spanked. I would even line myself up for it just to save time. Her weapon of choice? A white PLASTIC ruler. Now as far as rulers go, you want to be spanked by something hard, like a wooden ruler. When it bends like a plastic ruler, it stings. None of my teachers ever picked up that I was not lazy, or dull. I was just not good at math and no one ever took the time to get through to me, or help me find a way to understand it all. I would score very well in all my other subjects, but not math. Grade Three was also the first time I fell in love. Ahhhh! Tracy! She was a girl from British descent with long blond hair always neatly plaited into pigtails. I adored her, but she despised me. I thought that that was just the way of the world I guess. She was the beauty and I was the beast, and she was NOT having it! The more she hated me, the more I crushed over her. And she would continue to be in my class until Grade Six. *sigh* I even had visions of us married at one point, but that was not to be.
Grade Four. Mrs. Bickford. Not only did she take over from the grade three teacher, but went to great lengths to make sure that the whole class saw how badly I was doing in math. So much so that she even brought the head mistress into the class who was having a bad day and she, yelling, made a public example of me by comparing my fourth grade math homework to that of a third grader's. I had grown to hate school so much that I looked forward to days when I would be sick with the flu. I could stay home and not have to deal with these viking, fang-filled teachers.
Grade Five. Mrs. Mills. The grandmother of teachers. She was the oldest and longest teaching teacher in the school. A fantastic oratrix, and very much involved in the scouts (she was our den mother and yes I was a cub scout in school for a short time), she seemed to be the type of teacher that I would enjoy and would be patient with me. NO DICE! She never beat us for failing tests, but boy she knew how to make you feel bad. One morning, as a gesture to butter her up, I brought her flowers from my mother's garden. She and my mother were BOTH not impressed! She threw them in the garbage. And as with all the teachers I've known up to this point, they all had an addiction to red ink pens!!!! This grade was however the first time we were introduced to writing with pens. We had up to that point been writing with pencils only.
Grade Six! Ms. Pancham! I had always been afraid of teachers who have any South Asian in them (i.e. from India). We always thought them to be impervious to the hottest peppers and could eat them straight without flinching (which she could) and that the more peppers she ate, the hotter her spankings became. And they did! She was the ONLY teacher in the school who had a bamboo cane as a spanking weapon. Something I have felt, but at this point, not that often. I had finally for the first time in my life started catching on to math!!!! I had found a way to figure it out for myself. By this point, my homework was always neatly done and I was always ready for anything. It was there that I passed my Common Entrance exams to get into high school, and also was selected to be deputy head boy of the student body. And even then, I was still scared of Mrs. McGunn!!!!
HIGH SCHOOL!!!
First Form (Grade Seven). As a new high schooler, I took all the advice given to me and made sure that I was rarely seen being dropped to school by my mother. I went to an all boys' high school. Right beside us was the all girls' high school. You can just imagine how this turned out. There was (and still is) a 30 foot barbed wire fence that seperates the two schools. My first form teacher's name was Mr. Richards. He was an actor. I had seen him in a play with the same theatre trouppe that I have also acted with in Jamaica. He always seemed to have his head in the clouds because he never really cared anything about any of us. We saw him from time to time, and he loved to wear white jeans. So he quit, and the new teacher was a lady I will never forget. She was also an actress and a dub poetess named Claudette Richardson-Pious. She was a stout lady with a booming voice so loud that it could kill a bowl of goldfish. When she yelled, we sat and sprouted halos...well, I did! I was always afraid that she would sit on top of us and crush us all to death if we rubbed her the wrong way. And she looked like she was capable of it too! She accused us of sending up her blood pressure and driving her screaming to insanity!! One day, she had had it with us and looked like she was going to pull her hair out any minute. There were other teachers like Mrs. Kumar our math teacher, who always wore a sari, Mrs. Davidson, who was addicted to giving us book reports to write on any and everything she could think of, and Mrs. Chevannes. our guidance councellor who finally explained to us why it is that when we wake up in the mornings, our 'soldiers' are saluting at full attention. That is EXACTLY how she said it!
Second Form (Grade Eight). Ms. Gabbidon. She ruled by instilling in us the word of God! She made us all learn all of 1 Corinthians 13 which we had to recite everyday at form time, by heart! She was someone else who had the joy of the Lord in her. One day we were all given a class detention by another teacher to write the 23rd Psalm 10 times after school and she heard about it and increased it to 25 times! Yep! She was the quintessential Pentecostal woman, with no jewellery and a stern look.
Halellu-YER!
Third Form (Grade Nine). Mr. Kerr. He was our Chemistry teacher and the best chem teacher I ever had. It was because of him why I would later be able to pass CXC chemistry. He was a rasta man who commanded attention, and always smelled of burned tobacco and at times, something else (illegal).
Forth Form (Grade Ten). Mr. Blue! He was also our Geography teacher. The only thing I remember about him was that he always smelled of old sweat, and it was always so pungent! He told us when asked point blank that he did not believe in wearing deodorant. And since I sat in the front of the class, I was always downwind of him. It was a miserable existence! It was here that we began our study and training for the CXC and GCE examinations, which all the schools in the entire caribbean would take at the same time. It is akin to exams one takes for graduating from high school with your diploma.
Fifth Form (Grade Eleven). We never saw our form teacher. We knew he existed but he never showed up for anything. The one teacher I do remember was our Spanish teacher, Mrs. Willan. She had a habbit of wearing clothes that were way too tight and heels that were way too high. She always talked to us about her Cosby Show-like family and home and how they are all perfect in every way. We really could not have cared less. What we thought we were getting in a Spanish class always turned into a discussion on how well her sons do at cricket. But we endured. There were also teachers like Mrs. Tamms, our math teacher who always came to class looking half drunk and out of it (after classes with her, we would all congregate and worry collectively about our futures!), and with cracked heels, Ms. McLeod who everyday looked like she was just off a catwalk (*snap* VOGUE!), and Mr. Ballentyne who was just...always on a permanent personal vendetta against us. I think it had something to do with a certain lady teacher he had a crush on who quit because the students made her life a living nightmare and she could not take it anymore. So he was out to kill us, slowly!
I went to Lower and Upper Sixth Forms (Grades Twelve and Thirteen) but those years are such a blur to me because I did most of my course work over at the girls' school because the course work at that point was shared.
So there you have it. It is amazing to me that after all of this, I am still sane. But NOW you see why I am so afraid to be eaten, and always wondering why you are all out to get MOI!
