Wearing sensible shoes and a dress with the hem only a few inches above the floor, stuffy old Mrs. Murphy stepped from behind her desk and scanned the room full of bored high school juniors. I figured she couldn’t see me, because my buddy Gary Selby and I practiced the now lost art of Classroom Invisibility.
We developed that carefully honed skill by sitting still as posts in our fifth grade math class seven years earlier, and wishing ourselves invisible for an hour a day, every day, in the hope that Miss Exum wouldn’t call on us to work a New Math problem on the blackboard. After the authorities abandoned arithmetic the year before, I was a lost soul wondering exactly how letters and symbols forced themselves into simple and understandable numbers and fractions.
Each time Miss Exum called our fellow inmates to the board for their fair share of torture, Gary and I remained perfectly still and willed ourselves to blend into the back of the room. We became one with the scarred, wooden desks so old they had inkwell holes in the upper right-hand corner of the writing surface.
In fact, at the end of that year when we rose to leave math class on the last day of school, Miss Exum was shocked to see that the desks had been occupied at all.
This camouflage worked just as well years later in English class, and Miss Murphy’s eyes skipped across the room. “Now that we’ve completed this section on Emily Bronte, your assignment for the weekend is a five-page report on the topic assigned specifically for each of you. Write these down please as I read the titles. Carolyn Anderson, your paper is entitled, A Discussion of the Victorian Themes in Jayne Eyre.”
Since my name was spelled and pronounced differently than Carolyn, and I had no idea what she was talking about, I drifted off into anticipation of a squirrel hunt I’d been promised for the next day. As imaginary bushytails scampered through my empty head, Miss Murphy went through her alphabetical list of tortures until she finally came to the last two.
“Gary Selby. Social Class Separation in Wuthering Heights.”
He groaned beside me. “I only read the comic book version.”
She frowned at the two empty desks in the back and finally located him. “Selby, have you been here all this period?”
“All semester.”
“You’re out of order on my rolls.”
“Wish I could help.”
She glowered in our general direction. “That just added a page to your report, mister.”
I grinned. “Smooth move, Ex Lax.”
She heard me and checked her class roll again. “Humm. Wortham.”
We made eye contact for the first time that year. “Yes ma’am.”
“I don’t recognize you.”
“It’s me. Five foot two. Brown hair and eyes.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Maybe you should do something to make yourself distinctive.”
“I’ll grow a handlebar mustache.”
“That would work.”
I went to work on it as she considered her notes. “Your paper will be titled, The Significance of Windows in Wuthering Heights. All right class, I’ll need those on my desk when you come into class on Monday.”
The bell rang and we disappeared like puffs of smoke.
I went hunting the next morning with the Old Man and finished Saturday off by hanging out with my cousin. Sunday arrived and I squirmed beside my grandmother on a hard church pew, vaguely remembering I had something else to do.
It was about six that evening and our black and white TV was tuned to reruns of Disney’s Wonderful World of Color when I remembered I had a paper due. I found the scrap I’d scribbled on and panicked at the title.
There were windows in Wuthering Heights???
I dug out my copy from underneath a pile of Louis L’Amour and Mickey Spillane paperbacks and flipped through the chapters. Yep, the author talked incessantly about windows.
I glanced out the similar opening in my bedroom and had an idea. I wrote, “Wuthering Heights was a good book. The windows in Wuthering Heights looked outside at the sky and moors that are big fields of grass that are not like the grass in the yards we have on my street….”
It drifted on from there and writing as large as possible, sometimes only five words to a sentence, I scratched out the assignment. Mom kept that paper for years, (along with the next year’s particularly well-written ten-page research project entitled, Voodooism), but it somehow vanished through the years.
We know today that windows in Emily Bronte’s work represent the barriers in that society, and I can go on about trapped emotions, Catherine’s memories, good and evil, life and death, and how Heathcliff symbolically let Catherine’s spirit inside by opening a window, but I wonder if Emily had all that in mind as she penned the manuscript.
I’ve always maintained she just wanted to write an entertaining story about her world. What do you think?
Like Miss Emily, tell your story and let the academics hash it out later.
Rev, you had me at “New Math.” I got snared in that transition and never recovered. And wooden desks so old they had inkwell holes. And manual typewriters that required at least five pounds of pressure to strike each key.
Mrs. Shore was my eighth grade English teacher with stacked heels and snowy curls under a nearly invisible hairnet (except some nets were decorated with tiny colored beads). She hammered grammar, sentence diagraming, the correct use of “its” and “it’s” into me.
I sat in the front row and didn’t mind a bit. Today I still use those tools and they are so ingrained and automatic that I’m not aware of them.
Math classes? If I could, I would have crawled under the desk. Not a single sine, cosine, or tangent stuck.
Thanks for a trip down memory lane.
I kinda beat up on Mrs. Murphy, but she was an excellent teacher and helped launch this writing career, I’m sure. However, my grade in that class one semester was lower than I wanted, and I had the opportunity to do some extra credit. I don’t remember what it was, but the results were catastrophic. I turned it in, EXTRA credit mind you, and she felt it was so lacking in quality that she dropped my semester grade another point.
I still bring that up when I’m in my cups.
Thanks for writing!
Reminds me of Mr. Holtby. Wish I’d had your invisibility skills. On back-to-school/parents’ nights, the Hubster would almost always ask the English teachers whether the authors actually had all that symbolism in mind when they wrote the books.
Oh, and Mr. Holtby did respond to the same question asked by a student in class one day. He said, “The author probably thought that word/those words worked best.”
That was my freshman Sophomore English teacher, Miss Adams. She was more interested in the art of writing, and was one of my two inspirational teachers.
later gator
Ugh. Any mention of math is a horror story. My worst teachers were math teachers and I never recovered.
“…tell your story and let the academics hash it out later.” Exactly. Every writer writes their story with intention but I want the reader to take away from it what they will.
…and then there was that one fifth grade math teacher…but I shouldn’t hammer on them any more. I was a teacher once, and retired from a career in education (the Bride was a career educator, also, and both daughters work in the system now, one a high school librarian and the other an elementary school counselor. We’re bust a button proud of them both). The VAST majority of teachers were fine, and they turned out graduates who wanted to learn and graduate.
I was God’s gift to English teachers. As long as I didn’t have to give an oral report, I was happy, and I could write long papers on almost anything. Metaphors and images were another happy place. Most of my chosen paper topics in undergraduate and graduate school circled around metaphors, images, and their relationship to structure. Also Carl Jung. I loved him, too.
Did my popular novels have this? Heck, yes. It was subtle as heck because genre novels, but it enriched the novels and resonated like heck. Plus, it amused me.
Oh, you were the one. It took me to college before I bloomed in a creating writing class and. never looked back.
A likely apocryphal hypothetical story as told to me by a fellow prisoner.
He was enrolled at BU in a freshman Literature class held in an auditorium with several hundred other frosh. The prof was dissecting a piece of poetry and pointing out the meaning of each section, when a guy gets up in the fourth row and says “It doesn’t mean that at all!” The prof says “and who might you be, sir?” and the guy says “I’m ___________ and I wrote that.”
Whereupon the prof says “You’re the last person we want to hear from.” and continues the lecture.
True? I don’t know but it makes for a rattling good tale.
That’s hilarious!
I remember when I did my only term paper, for Freshman English, a class I had been assigned to as required when I transferred from the UNAM in Mexico City to Seattle.
I chose to write the paper (the teacher was guiding us through all the stages of a term paper, including research) on the psychological aspects of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – and discovered that our campus library had a whole set of journals of some literary group, and literally hundreds of people had written about Wuthering Heights, including many on the windows motifs!
I was in hog (research) heaven! Never seen anything like it.
It was like a puzzle. I dug in enthusiastically, got an A+, and only later found out that, since they had given enough credits to transfer as a junior (all math and physics, as UNAM didn’t have electives – only what you were going to get a degree in, which was physics), I didn’t have to take Freshman English!
Everyone else in my class had been acting as if it were the most boring class of all – I had a ball. It was my first – and only – English class, I had no idea people focused on English literature like that.
Thanks for mentioning the windows – lovely trip down a bumpy memory lane.
I wish I could remember my 8th grade English teacher’s name, but she was so boring I read “Hawaii” and “Alaska” in her class and several Daphne Du Maurier books while she was teaching. It was a last minute schedule change from my advanced English class since they changed the time for band.
My most memorable time was when she assigned us to write an essay on wasting time since the class was rowdy that day. I forgot about it, so during study hall I wrote a poem on wasting time. She read it to the class then asked if I minded if she had it published in some educational Journal at the time. It took me all of a half-hour to jot that poem down, unwilling to write a boring paper on time. I ended up with a A in the class even though I never paid attention to what she was teaching since I’d had everything she was teaching the year before.
So had my first “published” writing that year but avoided actually writing stories other than for my English class I had to take while getting my nursing degree until I was close to retirement. Like you, I was resistant to those papers and usually did them at the last moment, finding better things to read (or so I thought) that were more exciting.