My Turn: School days were not all halcyon

"Hen-ry, Oh, Hen-ry," I cooed in my finest honey-voiced adolescent schoolgirl impersonation. The words moved quickly from my back-row seat to the front of the classroom where the seventh-grade social studies teacher I’ll called Henry Pursuet was scrawling notes about the Battle of Saratoga on the blackboard panels that spanned the room’s front wall.

Chalk in hand and his back to the class, day after day Henry filled one panel after another, layering each with an ongoing parade of historical dates, names and long-ago happenings.

He would scoot back to the first panel immediately after filling the last, erasing what he had first written, and begin scribbling anew. Students dutifully copied every word into the social studies section of their three-ring binders in silence.

This was the year 1960 and pedagogy, at least in Henry’s class, was primitive: Copy the notes, listen to Henry read the notes, take a test on the notes, repeat again and again.

It was all so unimaginative, I thought, and oh-so-boring. And it was the devilish fingers of boredom that tickled my insurrection bones and led me to act out.

"Hen-ry, Oh Hen-ry" was my rebellious anthem and, when I delivered it in my singsong fashion, the whole class laughed.

Not Henry. He froze in place, rigid as a day-old cadaver, the moment my insolence pricked his ears. A tomato-red blotch, large enough for all to see, sneaked under his white button-down collar and mushroomed up the nape of his neck.

The whole class laughed again, louder this time.

Henry reeled round and evil-eyed the room. I had on my "I’m innocent" face, the one I practiced in the mirror for times like this. But it didn’t matter; he knew I was the one. This wasn’t the first time I called out in class.

Henry marched down the shiny linoleum floor slipping between the hard wood desks, twisting and turning his heavy, metallic college ring around his finger, making sure the hard, blue center stone faced downward.

He stepped past me, then circled back. A whiff of Aqua Velva reported he stood directly behind me. And then, without warning, Henry windmilled his arm and crashed his ring, stone prone and prominent, on top of my head.

Whack! My skull vibrated like a thumped tuning fork. I pretended all was well and even forced a laugh to show no harm was done, but I struggled to dam up the tears moistening my eyes.

Henry returned to the blackboard and continued writing. My classmates resumed their copying.

I know I was wrong to make fun of Henry. I’ve been remorseful about my disrespect a long while. But back then I judged it my special calling, divinely inspired I imagined, to liven things up for my classmates. Henry, just out of college and not yet schooled in how to handle a sniper attack from a smart-aleck 12-year-old, was easy pickings.

Today a teacher would get into big trouble doing what Henry did. Corporal punishment is no longer tolerated; it was banned in New York State in 1985. But things were different in those days. I accepted Henry’s punishment as fair trade for embarrassing him. His frontier justice was painful, and while it taught me a lesson, to this day I can’t help thinking there must have been a less forceful way he could have disciplined me.

Ed Daniels,

Levittown