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The Story of Mrs. Wilbur

I thought I would tell the story of second grade and Mrs. Wilbur. It is long, but I had to suffer through the whole damn year, why should you get off easy? So here goes.

If there were Bad Teacher Court and I took Mrs. Wilbur to trial there, the defense could present the case as follows: Mrs. Wilbur, public school teacher of long standing, was faced with a troubled student, me. After months of my refusal to participate in class or do my schoolwork, along with other crimes of subversion too minor to bother mentioning here, Mrs. Wilbur consulted with parents and guidance counselors to come up with a plan that allowed me to go on to the third grade, no harm done. What is the big? Simple. A minor ripple. No lasting scars to see, not even a black mark on the academic record. Why dig this up at all?

Because. People like Mrs. Wilbur thrive in the murky subjective underground, the things that can't be proven even in pretend court. Here are some more things about second grade, things with no witnesses:

Mrs. Wilbur was a very bad teacher. Mrs. Wilbur would hand out long lists of assignments for us to do on our own, so that we could "learn to structure our time." This is nonsense. Most seven-year-olds know shit about structuring time. Faced with a bewildering maze of classwork with nebulous due dates, and no real clue as to how to prioritize it all, I floundered and grew bored.

I am convinced that this whole time-structuring thing was not a misguided notion, but a mask for her complete indifference to her students. Above all, Mrs. Wilbur did not want to be bothered. Mrs. Wilbur would pretend not to hear questions while she was writing lists of assignments on the blackboard. Mrs. Wilbur would leave the classroom for several minutes at a stretch, and then when she returned to find us flying paper airplanes or whatever, would scold us for acting like a bunch of unsupervised seven-year-olds, because she really did not want to have to deal with the fact that that's what we were.

Mrs. Wilbur was boring. She spent a lot of time talking with her back to the class, writing on the board, or talking while looking down at a book. Kids would laugh, whisper and sometimes talk right over her without getting much of a reaction.

Mrs. Wilbur was either crazy, dumb or both. Mrs. Wilbur created spelling lists with words like "negligee" on them. Mrs. Wilbur handed out homework assignments, and at the bottom of each worksheet was a question: "How did you feel about doing this assignment?" followed by a smiley face, a neutral face, and a sad face. You were to circle one of these. I circled the smiley face every time. What else could you do?

Mrs. Wilbur didn't quite know what to do with us. When two boys got carried away with teasing me at the beginning of reading circle one day and I had a real meltdown, crying and screaming and all, we were kind of on our own. It was up to them to get freaked out by my reaction and apologize, and up to me to accept it, while she looked at us like we were interesting bugs.

Mrs. Wilbur taught me the important lesson that an adult could dislike me, could be as viciously unfair and two-faced as the mean popular girls were. I will never forget the first time I realized this. A second-grader doesn't know much about diplomacy, and it was early in the school year, and so when I noticed that one of the words on the day's spelling list was misspelled I didn't even think twice about pointing it out to her. I don't remember what Mrs. Wilbur said. I remember that Mrs. Wilbur smiled, and it was the scariest thing I'd ever seen, because a smile in my experience was not supposed to telegraph "I hate you. You little bitch. You little nothing." I remember that after recess, the spelling list was erased.

I pretty much stopped doing any work at all in the middle of the fall, I'd guess. I'd read instead, book hidden behind my workbook or tucked into my lap under my desk. If Mrs. Wilbur caught me, she'd yell, but she never took the book away and she never mentioned the growing list of overdue work. But then. On the last day of classes before winter break, Mrs. Wilbur pulled me aside and, with that smile, told me: "You know Hilary, you're going to have to make up all that work while you're on vacation, or you probably won't get into the third grade." I believe she even had a list prepared for me, presented with another smile, written in her neat and perfect schoolteacher handwriting, of every single piece of work outstanding. So thoughtful.

I experienced mild synesthesia when I was a kid, and Christmas break exists in my memory as greasy grayish-yellow: the colors for failure and dread. Of course, I didn't do a single bit of the missing schoolwork; at that point it was way too big to even think about. Also of course, I didn't say anything to my mom about this. I knew enough to know that I was in deep shit here.

This brings us to an interesting point - one that interests me, anyway. I wonder why it was that my mom didn't find out about this whole deal until school started up again in January, and I cried every morning before leaving the house? Why only when I started getting physically sick, running out of the classroom to throw up in the bathroom (or on one notable occasion, into the basin of the water fountain right outside the room, yeah, I was that nasty throwing-up girl now on top of everything else), only when my mom called a meeting with my teacher to discuss all this did Mrs. Wilbur happen to mention that I hadn't done any work in months?

At the time, it just seemed like The Way Things Were. It was something between me and my teacher, who smiled that smile at me, whose trust I had betrayed by not using all the independence she gave me wisely, whom I was not good enough for. If I had just done the work during my break as she so kindly offered, no outsiders would have needed to know.

I have some new theories now, though. For example, now I know that one of the first things Mrs. Wilbur said to my mom upon revealing my huge backlog of classwork, after pretty much ignoring me for the first half of the year, during their first one-on-one meeting, was "I think Hilary is having a delayed reaction to your divorce." The divorce that happened when I was two? Yeah, that divorce. And there is just something about that statement, something that makes it fit very neatly next to the memory of how Mrs. Wilbur used to look at me as if I were less than the sum of my parts.

When I started ignoring Mrs. Wilbur and my classwork, it allowed her to fit me more neatly into the "troubled, neglected child from a broken home" box. If she had to hide what was going on from my mom in order to fulfill the "neglected" part, well, that was a better option than facing the fact that she was a crappy teacher who hated kids. Kids who corrected her spelling. Kids who asked her questions when she was trying to teach. Kids who didn't get along with the other kids, who threw up, who got made fun of a lot and who were weak enough to get upset about it. Kids who were smart enough to be bored and dumb enough to show it.

Of course I'm projecting here, just guessing. But you'll never be able to convince me, not with a signed affidavit or a lie detector test or anything, that Mrs. Wilbur did not hate me. It's pretty easy to fool kids about a lot of things, but there are some things that they are very good at picking up despite your best efforts to hide them. Mrs. Wilbur might as well have sprouted horns and fangs, the way she smiled at me, and I am as sure that that memory is real and objective as I am about anything.

When Mrs. Wilbur suggested to my mom that I go to the counselor, she made sure to prep him on my issues. And so I spent a lot of time that winter in Mr. Spoon's office, playing with dolls and wondering why this strange, pinched little man was asking me if the mommy and daddy dolls ever fought in front of the kid dolls.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Wilbur focused her creative teaching skills on making sure that I was able to finish all my work. She asked the class to "help" me stay focused by telling her if I was slacking off. A few days later, she announced that from now on, I would have my own special box for turning in homework, still with dutifully circled smiley faces, separate from the other kids' box. Oh, I was destined for popularity, I tell you.

It's funny, but I can't really remember how it all ended. I do remember that when it was determined that I wasn't improving under the watchful eye of Mrs. Wilbur and Mr. Spoon, an expert was called in from outside the school. The new person asked questions that I could make up my own answers to; she seemed to actually be listening to the answers. At the time, I only knew that talking to her was a great relief compared to sessions with Mr. Spoon, with whom I always felt like I was taking a test I hadn't prepared for. Now I know that this new psychologist took one look at the their theories, laughed her ass off, and told them that instead of worrying me about my parents' divorce they ought to be finding me some interesting schoolwork to do so I could catch up with the rest of the class.

And somehow I did. There was no triumphant ending, no day of celebration to mark my last moment in that classroom. Just a gradual lessening of the dread and stress and guilt, and the lingering knowledge that you can be wrong, and bad, and mean, and still get all the power.

So I guess I won, but it has never felt like it. That is probably because nothing I did ever made Mrs. Wilbur stop smiling that smile at me, or admit that she was wrong, or congratulate me on making it through that period at last. It's not the biggest deal in the world. But what's really too bad is that almost everyone has a Mrs. Wilbur of their own, the experience of realizing that someone who is stupider and pettier and altogether worse than you holds all the cards and there's nothing you can do. The human race could really use a litmus test for teachers and bosses and cops and all positions where authority can be wielded subjectively, to keep the Mrs. Wilburs out.

Posted by hilatron at October 6, 2003 07:10 PM | TrackBack