All the worst things I learned in life, I learned in second grade. Second grade happened in 1956–57 for me, and it was mostly about discovering human limitations, including mine.
Starting into the school year, I was doing fine. I had got through all of first grade without the teacher ever being able to make me listen to her. So I thought it was going to be like that for the duration. That meant I could do what you were supposed to do in school, namely learn stuff, without having to worry about interference from a stupid adult.
The first year of grade school, I learned how to read phonetically and how to do long multiplication, so I had high hopes for the second year. Maybe I’d finally get to nuclear physics like I wanted to. Or cosmology. Or how to build a rocket. All I’d need were the books and to be allowed to go at them in peace.
Unfortunately, my second grade teacher, who for no special reason I’ll call Ms. Shriek, wouldn’t allow herself not to be listened to. She used every trick in the book to get my attention, and to this day I don’t know to what purpose.
Besides screeching at me, she also had other tricks, such as calling my parents in to turn up the heat or endlessly drilling me at tasks that were insane.
A case in point was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Village Blacksmith.” You may remember it as the one that starts, “Under the spreading chestnut tree / The village smithy stands.” I had one day to take that poem home and memorize all 48 lines and recite them in class the next day. I did not. I got no further than “The village smithy laid” and she corrected me, “stands,” and I said, “sure, stands,” and stared at her. Because I didn’t know the very next word.
This went on for about a week. I got as far as “large and sinewy hands.” Line four. Which I could barely say with a straight face, because “sinewy” is hilarious if a seven-year-old really pays attention to it. So is “his bellows blow,” if you’re a normal human being. Seriously, “bellows blow”? All in all, I spent probably 80 hours of my life reading that poem over and over again with the idea that I would somehow remember it, and I never did. Because I couldn’t. But I had heard her, and her sounding anvil, too.
This is me now, 60 years later, reciting the poem “The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wordswad Hornfellow: “Under the spreading chestnut tree / the village smithy lay / the smith, a mighty man is he / he’s a smithy and he’s okay / and the odor of his brawny pits / will never go away.”
There was another time where I was supposed to dance in a line with the other kids. It was for a stage show we were to put on for the parents. I could not learn the steps. Ms. Shriek took “couldn’t” to be “wouldn’t.” She screamed at me incessantly during rehearsal. No amount of screaming at me caused me to learn the steps. I never did. But I had heard her.
I learned to listen to Ms. Shriek in second grade. That was most of my second grade education, looking back on it. What I learned in school: 1) Listen to Ms. Shriek. 2) You’ll never learn the rest of this. You can’t.
I eventually figured out that Ms. Shriek and I had two different ideas of what we were doing. I was there to learn truths, she was there to teach me to obey. So from her perspective there was only one truth that mattered, which was that I had to do what she said. There was no couldn’t, there was only wouldn’t, even if that weren’t true. Because truth was irrelevant to her.
Ms. Shriek would be very much at home with the political scene in America today.