Fourth Grade, Foul and Fierce

"Who did you play with at recess today?"

"We didn't get recess!" my son exclaimed. "Mr. K said he was embarrassed that we were so loud at lunch, so we had to walk five laps around the parking instead of playing." 

This year my oldest is in third grade, and third grade is hard. It's changing classes, letter grades, and increased expectations. And we've moved away from motherly teachers toward tougher teachers, it seems. 

My son's story took me back to my own elementary days, in a sand-colored building with three cavernous halls ready to swallow me whole. Each classroom ceiling terminated in the point of a triangle, its vertical side featuring a row of windows designed to withstand Gulf hurricanes and tornadoes.

But the storm I weathered in fourth grade wasn't wind and water. It was Mr. Meacham, who taught math, science, and social studies - and also educated me in debilitating anxiety. 

Fourth-grade me

I first became aware of Mr. Meacham in third grade. It was the late 1980s and I was enrolled in a gifted and talented course that met in a science lab-turned-classroom. The teacher, Mrs. Herndon, was eccentric - she kept a pig fetus in a jar, wore dramatic blue and brown eyeshadow winged up to her eyebrows, and was given to singing phrases of her lessons in operatic soprano. We weren't sure if we loved her or feared her.

Mr. Meacham was the teacher who would stride into her room without announcement and hand her a single piece of Trident during our afternoon class. It happened daily, or at least often enough to warrant suspicion. We students decided they shared a burning love which could only be communicated through sugar-free chewing gum. If we were wrong, it didn't matter much.

He had a neatly trimmed full beard and a horseshoe of brown hair crowned with a shiny pate. His eyes were framed by thin glasses. He was at least a thousand years old, and even more old-fashioned. Every school day he wore a complete suit despite the Texas heat, matching coat and slacks in heavy brown wool flecked with white, or gray glen plaid, or one particularly memorable three-piece ensemble that was blue and white checkered. He was stuffy, serious, and if the gossip was true, very strict. 

My gut flooded with dread when I learned he would be my homeroom teacher in fourth grade. 

I was in his classroom from the start of the day until lunchtime, learning long division, the states of matter, and the three branches of government. True to rumor, he was nit-picky, authoritative, and ambidextrous - watching him write on the board with one hand and grade papers at his desk with the other only increased our discomfort. Being neither welcoming nor gracious, to this day I don't understand why anyone let him teach classes full of disorganized, boisterous children. 

Immediately I was unnerved by his officious manner and the condescending way he could talk to us. He often put kids on the spot uncomfortably, like making us stand up to hiccup on command if we were suffering from those annoying (and childishly entertaining) diaphragm spasms. Despite not teaching English, he would stop students mid-sentence and correct our language usage, making us say "off-en" instead of "off-ten" and "pen" instead of Texas slangy "pin." Walking into class dropped my heart into my stomach, next to swirling feelings of nervousness.  

One morning when the class was answering missing integer multiplication questions written on the chalkboard, a classmate mistook all of his question marks for 7's. When it was her turn to answer aloud, Maribel was quite obviously confused. She stuttered and faltered, tried to explain that she didn't understand the questions. In front of the class Mr. Meacham demanded to know what was the matter with her, then shook his head in frustration and moved on. It turned out Maribel needed glasses, not shaming. She showed up in spectacles not long after.

As fall went on I became more scared Mr. Meacham would call on me for an answer or reprimand me for a mistake. Just two months into the school year I felt overwhelmed, caught in a storm and unable to find safe shelter. Every day I'd leave home with my stomach churning. By the end of October, I was so nervous that I missed an entire week of school - I'd throw up each morning as our station wagon pulled into the small parking lot just outside the double glass doors. I couldn't bear to go in. My parents would turn around and drive me back home. 

I was 9 years old. 

The site of my early education in anxiety

I mustered enormous courage to return to school after Halloween. But the break in tension was short-lived. Mr. Meacham asked his students to raise their hand if they had enjoyed a Halloween festival that weekend. I made the grave error of holding my tiny fingers in the air, and he railed on me. "You went to a Halloween festival even though you were sick all week?" he spat from across the room. Under his public criticism, I shrank in my blue metal chair. There was no way I could explain that it was he who was making me sick.

My family lived on ends that never met, and the winter of fourth grade was no exception. My household went a week without electricity, the four of us sleeping on a pull-out couch in our den by a wood-burning fireplace for warmth. After several days of completing homework by the light of a hurricane lamp and bathing in water heated on a camping stove, I was not at my best. I got a math question wrong at the chalkboard. Mr. Meacham berated me in front of the class for performing so poorly. "I just don't know what's wrong with you this week," he snapped. I stared at the stub of chalk in my hand and tried hard not to cry. 

Either my parents or perhaps Mr. Meacham himself referred me to the school guidance counselor, who in those days doubled as school psychologist. She was kind and attentive. Something changed, but I don't know exactly what; I don't recall any more incidents with Mr. Meacham that spring, though it's possible my memory is incomplete. Emotional trauma can do that to a child. I successfully finished fourth grade, and I'd like to say I never saw him again. 

Unfortunately, he moved up to sixth grade math. And brought his wool suits and acerbic personality with him.

Our sixth grade was a campus unto itself, with classroom buildings scattered around like debris washed ashore. A long concrete sidewalk dead-ended at the door of his classroom. It was like marching to the scaffold every day for last period.  

That year he taught us rounding, multiplying and dividing fractions, how Magic Johnson had probably spread HIV exponentially, and that forehead should always be pronounced "forrid." He still forbade us from saying "off-ten," and also prohibited at least one student from entering his classroom with one strap of his overalls unfastened and dangling down his back (as was the fad then) on grounds that it was disrespectful. To whom, I'm not sure. 

Surely there were students he liked. Still, I was not one of them. My childhood friends recall how he addressed me as though I perpetually irritated him. Although I hated going to class, I don't remember any specific instances of suffering directed at me that year - not in his class, anyway. If my son thinks third grade is hard, wait until he gets to middle school.

I pushed through sixth and high school and college, and the old buildings were demolished to make way for new. But a part of me is still 9 years old and nauseous, balled tight in a car in an elementary parking lot. Writing these words more than 30 years later, my stomach swirls and my armpits sweat. I fear that he might read this and belittle me across the miles for speaking out of turn. At least I will say "off-en" correctly.

Finding the lesson is part of healing. For a while I've tried to identify what I learned from Mr. Meacham besides numbers and anxiety.  I've even considered that perhaps the problem was mine, for not being thicker skinned. I won't say those two years taught me patience or empathy, nor that they made me stronger. The only conclusion I draw is that sometimes the weather around us is foul and fierce, yet we go on.

I don't contend that my son's class walking laps at recess is in any way tantamount to what I endured. But you can bet I'm on heightened alert for any teacher or coach or other adult who would repeatedly tear down a child. Some people don't deserve to have an indelible impact on children.