(8) Boxed Up

The first year of teaching for anyone is usually a learning curve, but to teach in the Calliope made that learning curve exponentially harder. As a first year teacher, my college teacher preparation program did not prepare me for the kinds of situations that I would have to face on a minute by minute basis. I learned what I needed to know to survive from my colleagues and the community.

That year, I watched our shiny, new principal unravel into a fatigued, cranky, and self-serving leader whose new agenda seemed to be moving on up to a district level director job. However, as I know now, that would not happen for a few years. The reality is that our district office expected administrators to do their time (and to demonstrate that they had served their time loyally) in order to get out.

With no real leader, my colleagues stepped up and took over my education. The person who had the most direct access and influence over me was Mrs. Prentiss. We both taught fifth grade and our classrooms were next door to each other. There was a door in the back that connected both our rooms together.

In order to have a relationship with Mrs. Prentiss, I had to compartmentalize what I knew about her as a person and what I would find out about her as a teacher. I had to learn how to put my thoughts and feelings into separate boxes in order to move forward. This was a skill that I came to rely on for many people and situations during those first years. If I had not used separate boxes, I would have lost my mind.

(9) Sad Sad People

The title of this photo by A. Maheshwari best sums up the emotional climate in Mrs. Prentiss' classroom. I want to preface this post by saying that Mrs. Prentiss was the exception at the school. The other teachers that I worked with were, for the most part, caring professionals. We all, at different times, made attempts to rescue students out of her room, if only for a short while. Looking back now, I am struck that Mrs. Prentiss was enabled for so long and would be for her entire thirty year career.

It's still confusing for me to write about her. On the one hand, she was my mentor and was a great support to me for my first years. I liked her as a person. She had a sharp wit and a gripping life story which included overcoming the abject poverty of her childhood, and as an adult, surviving breast cancer. She was a wife and a doting mother. Her only child, a daughter, at that time was graduating from medical school. She was well traveled and a phenomenal cook.

On the other hand, to most of her students, Mrs. Prentiss was an abusive monster.

One of her favorite forms of torture was punishing her students (especially boys) by having them stand in the back of the classroom for the entire day. This meant that they would miss lunch and would not be allowed restroom breaks. I remember incidents where standing students would urinate on themselves because they could not hold on any longer. I also remember an incident that I debated whether to write about, and then decided to include to illustrate the degree of humiliation that some of Mrs. Prentiss students had to endure.

I remember a time when a male student was left standing, and by the end of the day was moving his legs from side to side indicating that he needed to use the restroom. As the pressure to go grew stronger, he held on to his crotch area to further indicate the urgency. Mrs. Prentiss, came up to him and in front of the entire class said,

"Boy, what do you think? You are a man now? Baby.... Starch couldn't make that string between your legs hard!"

He was humiliated and she was surprised to see me standing in the doorway. I had the student go to the restroom and he ran from the class.

Mrs. Prentiss had a way with words and she used them creatively and daily to remind her students where they came from and how without her, they would be destined to "run the streets like their parents."

Beyond the daily emotional abuse, I recall a couple of times where she took her students into the restroom for their punishment. The school had a history of corporal punishment and I learned that the staff had only decided to stop the practice where the new principal came on board (in 1996) . I don't think Mrs. Prentiss stopped and I would hear her warn her students how she would "tear them up."

(13) Mrs. Prentiss In Memorium

While Mrs. Prentiss reign of terror was deeply disturbing, so was the behavior of the adults around her, including myself. We were educators who had invested our lives in the welfare of children yet, we allowed her to continue the emotional and physical abuse of children. I'm sharing what I learned with you because there are many forms of Mrs. Prentiss in the world, both in and out of the classroom, and in rich and poor communities everywhere. It's important to unpack how these people settle in to power so that we can alter the dynamic and prevent abuse. This is my take:

Mrs. Prentiss had a strong ideology. She herself had broken from the cycle of poverty of her childhood and wanted the same for her students, however the methods she chose were questionable. As one of our fellow blog readers, writes, "The teacher must have felt that humiliation would pull [her students] out of poverty." This resonates with another ideology, that of the American Puritans who believed that the state of bring poor was a result of moral depravity. Perhaps Mrs. Prentiss believed that physical suffering would lead her students to their moral and economic salvation.

As a 27 year veteran teacher in the community, she had taught two or three generations of students. Parents weren't likely to complain about her because they themselves had "experienced" her.

The staff and administration were equally intimidated. As the teacher's union representative Mrs. Prentiss was actively involved with negotiations with the school district. If you were a teacher, you needed Mrs. Prentiss as your advocate. The principal needed her support so that he could work with his staff effectively and keep his job. And the district needed to be on her good side as she was a member of the union team that negotiated the teacher contract and salaries.

These systemic aids enabled her poor behavior, and there was one additional and important contributing factor that existed, a quality that most abusers share. Mrs. Prentiss was sometimes nice. Not fake nice, but really nice. This left her students and all the rest of us confused just long enough before the next wave of abuse hit, and the cycle continued. This is a hard lesson for adults to learn, nevermind children. How do you reconcile your definition of a monster when there are moments when they draw you in lovingly?

Mrs. Prentiss went on to teach for a total of 30 years and retired the same year I left the school. I went to her retirement luncheon where there were hundreds of people in attendance, no former students though. Speakers described her work as a teacher and all of the important advances that she had contributed to as the union representative, all valid in some way.

I lost touch with her after that, but looked her up last month only to find that she passed away from cancer a year ago.