Dick & Jane on Crack - an ode to my first grade teacher, Miss Scott

It was 1978, and while kids today literally can’t spit anywhere on school property without their saliva soiling the shoes of a strategically placed Concerned Adult, the schoolyard circa ‘78 was very much a daily rendition of Golding’s Lord of the Flies: regular intervals throughout the day in which you either sunk, swam, or had your head displayed on a figurative stake as an example to the rest of the collective gaggle.

Those were the days when the bell at recess or lunch meant the kids trundled outside en masse while the teachers went to their private “lounge” to smoke cigarettes (or weed), drink coffee (or liquor), and presumably place bets on which insufferable prepubescent ingrate they thought would land him or herself in jail first.  Like National Geographic journalists observing primates in faraway exotic jungles, teachers observed the children passively and from a safe distance, allowing natural group dynamics take their course.  Leaders, followers and outcasts manifested as predictably as any mammalian hierarchy in any wilderness.

No one talked about bullying those days.  No pink shirt campaigns or public announcements or built-in curriculum items on the importance of playing nice in the sandbox or glossy pamphlets espousing best practices and menus of who and where and what can help or celebrity-stacked “hang in there it gets better” testimonials. Pierre “that’s-right-Mofos-I-married-jet-setting-socialite-Margaret” Trudeau was Canada’s bohemian-flavoured Prime Minister, and while bullying was certainly beginning to be acknowledged large scale (ie: Vietnam), it didn’t yet exist in the micro of our social culture.  Kind of like anorexia, which didn’t exist in the social consciousness until Karen Carpenter’s sad passing five years later.

Hierarchies evidenced themselves immediately, both in and outside the classroom, and at the very pinnacle of the prevailing totem-pole was our first-grade teacher, Miss Scott. A tall, lean, mean machine of a woman, Miss Scott could be best described as “Military Surplus in the Flesh” – the feminine counterpart to Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Kilgore (“I love the smell of Kinder-Fear in the morning!”).

With stark military-shaved grey hair, an endless wardrobe of grey sweat pants and windbreakers, a cosmetic repertoire that boasted only unflavoured chapstick, and an obvious, deeply rooted hate-on for children, Miss Scott’s most redeeming quality was the intermittent screeches she would make through the whistle that hung with the permanence of a Lutheran’s pectoral cross around her tense, wiry neck muscles.  Her wooden pointer mirrored an officious Drill Sergeant’s, pinched precisely between the underside of her upper arm and her armpit and angled perfectly for quick, easy and dramatic wielding at any moment’s whim.

I don’t doubt she would’ve packed a sawed-off shotgun if laws permitted elementary school teachers to do so, and while adult heterosexual women at the time swooned over the likes of Warren Beatty and John Travolta, I imagine Miss Scott’s idea of a pin-up would have been Georgia’s legendary Principal Joe Louis Clark wearing camouflage fatigues, holding a battering ram, standing on a large pile of adolescent skulls, and smoking a large ATF-seized Cuban cigar (erotic beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?).

Our strict daily regimens included rigorous morning callisthenics on the gravel field, rain or shine, and Miss Scott’s diehard belief in the tenets of “spare the rod, spoil the child” were more than clear to everyone.  She was prone to frequent fits of yelling and slamming rulers, aforementioned pointer and books or other large objects loudly on desks and tables to jolt us into line when we strayed.  As Drill Sergeants are wont to do, she would bend over and scream in the face of a child to emphasize her point, and she felt situations warranted such emphasis frequently.

One time we were gathered in the in the cafeteria kitchen for a lesson that involved demonstrations with the pots and pans that were stored there.  The lesson itinerary somehow ended up disintegrating into a sideshow that ended with Miss Scott dunking the head of one of our classmates in and out of a full sink of cold water at least three times in a row.  This was likely not included in the actual curriculum, and for my part, I can honestly admit the gist of the intended lesson was thoroughly lost. (I have no idea what the boy must have done to earn such a drastic consequence… key her car? Slash her tires, or her credit rating?  Vote Liberal or worse, Green?).  I recall our group stood in total silence as the surreal incident unfolded.

I felt excruciating knots in my stomach and internalized every awful detail my brain encoded: his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Her body overpowering his.  His small hands braced against the sink.  Her large hand pushing down on the back of his head.  His black wet hair clumping between her white fingers.  The sounds of the water splashing onto the floor.  The decibel of her voice muffling his gasps and cries.  His humiliation and pain suffocating my own nose and throat and mind…

I assumed everyone else shared my reaction, although in hindsight I’m sure the budding power-seekers in the group must have felt differently (ie: “‘what a fantastic idea!’ thought little Stevie Harper, the prepubescent sadist-with-conservative-leanings, while chewing his Bazooka bubble gum and making a mental note for adulthood”).  For the kids destined for public service through specialized enforcement (ie: “Waterboarding Expert”), this extraordinary event could have been a pivotal moment in their youth, a forever-memorable example of arbitrary authority and alpha-posturing at its supreme best.

To think of Miss Scott is to recall Nurse Ratched on a daily cocktail of Red Bull, PCP-dusted Crack Cocaine, and US-Marine-Grade Adrenaline, except stripped of any authority to simply medicate her wards.  Randle McMurphy’s nemesis teaching non-sedated, sugar-fuelled rug rats in the late-70’s post-hippie free-for-all known as public elementary school?  Learning Dick and Jane was never so hair-raising.  Of course, in 1987 the American Psychiatric Association would vote ADHD into existence and Miss Scott would be able to revel in a pharmaceutical culture that was not only content to dose the ingrate possums with Ritalin, but one that was financially invested in doing so on a gargantuan, multi-trillion-dollar-per-year scale (“bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” as the great Wordsworth wrote).  Until then, Miss Scott’s iron fist would have to rule our 9am-3pm cuckoo’s nest weekday school world – and, like Margaret Thatcher’s historic and seemingly endless reign over England, it did.

Miss Scott broke a thin wooden ruler over the knuckles of my right hand once, and it’s long been speculated that my “issues with authority” are rooted in this event (“two out of three Doctors agree!”).  My heinous transgression had been to wilfully ignore the assignment in front of me and instead gaze out the classroom window, engulfed in a quiet daydream that probably included unicorns, cotton candy clouds, rolling green hills and my own spacious castle full of toys and books specifically and devoid of people generally (at the time, the epitome of my personal and oft dreamt Eden).

While it’s true Miss Scott’s interruption was extremely effective in shattering my daydream (immediacy is important, as any contemporary child-development expert will attest), I had actually already developed a fairly advanced tolerance for physical pain by age six and was less impacted (pun intended) than she likely hoped.  Since the age of about four, I habitually chewed my fingernails so compulsively that the nerve endings were often exposed and infected, and my mother’s ongoing attempts to curb this habit entailed dipping the raw stumps of my fingers into cups of iodine antiseptic on a fairly regular basis.

(For the record, I chewed my fingers to the same extent through adolescence and well into adulthood.  The iodine did, however, increase my tolerance for bodily pain and fast-track my ability to physically dissociate – two skill-based assets which, by any measure, are each exponentially more valuable and pragmatic than even the most perfectly buffed, polished, shined and prettified manicure.  With these outcomes, however unintended, the routine was not all for naught.)

The sharp pain from Miss Scott’s ruler was relatively mild by comparison, though the incident itself was equally as jarring as that first memorable submersion of my self-injured fingertips into what I had, as a toddler, referred to as the “cup of sting.”   I will say that Miss Scott can take full credit for teaching me the importance of daydreaming less conspicuously when at school or otherwise in the presence of alpha-posturing authorities.  With the right teacher, some lessons need be learned only once.

The outrageous daily pearls of her instructive outbursts made it clearer than the purest ice crystallized methamphetamine: Miss Scott was the great equalizer – she was everyone’s bully.

Though unspoken, her supreme and fundamental lesson landed especially well amongst the bullies and eventual secret-service operatives in our grade-school gaggle (although everyone on the totem pole heeded the point) - any and all lateral violence between peers needed to occur outside the walls of the classroom and beyond the expanse of the adults’ conscious awareness.  As everyone knows, the best special ops missions (shit-kicking the resident geek at school, heading up the river to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, or any conceivable covert taboo in the vast universes that lay between) leave no determinable trace whatsoever.

Depending who you ask, waterboarding is considered either “unacceptable torture” or “necessary, effective interrogation” (aka: “Potayto/Potahto”).  And like waterboarding, Miss Scott’s educational methods, whatever pronunciation you prefer, were nothing if not ultimately effective in executing the facilitator’s intended agendas.

Delicate innocence and unique seedlings of human and spiritual potential that children only ever are or can be, we lunatic grade-one possums absorbed her lessons tremendously well, and we each blossomed accordingly.