My Mount Rushmore
In the
fall of 1990 my family drove to Alaska, seventeen states and four Canadian
provinces in three weeks. One of the
highlights for me was Mount Rushmore, a mind-boggling monument to four of our
most prominent presidents. A couple of
weeks ago I read in the Chattanooga Times Free Press an article by Dr. Clif Cleaveland
listing his Mount Rushmore of Teachers.
That got me thinking about the teachers I have had over a lifetime. I have chosen my faces to put on Mount
Rushmore.
The first
would be my third grade teacher, Mrs. Sywalka.
I thought she was very stern and intimidating and I was afraid of
her. But then she caught me with a book
on top of a book. I was reading the one
I wanted to read and sliding up the book the class was reading together, just
in time for my turn to read aloud. To my
humiliation she sent me to the cloak room as “punishment”. I wept until I realized she had permitted me
to bring my book with me. So I read
until called back into the classroom.
Later
Mrs. Sywalka kept me after class to give me a book wrapped in plastic. I was to wash my hands before I took the book
out of the plastic, then return it to the plastic when I was finished. She exchanged that book for another until I
had read an entire series, the Elsie Dinsmore series, in the original copies,
at that time probably seventy years old.
Mrs.
Sywalka understood a bored little girl who craved the knowledge available
through books. I think of her often as I look at the little drop-leaf desk she gave me and the scores of books around my
house.
The
second figure on my Mount Rushmore would be Mr. Field, my ninth grade French
and English teacher. He was a brand-new
teacher, a recent graduate from Harvard, and very hip. He sat cross-legged on top of his desk, his
tie (required by the school!) tossed over his shoulder. He gave me a firm foundation in French
(traditional formal pronunciation only), but his greater influence was on my
writing. Each week he assigned a topic
for a paragraph of no more than seventy-five words. The topics were imaginative and stimulating,
for instance, how to ride a nightmare.
But to this teenage girl who loved words, his assignments were very
difficult. You see, he counted words
before he graded. If you had over the seventy-five-word limit, he didn’t even bother to grade the paragraph. I loved verbosity, a gushing, flowery
garrulousness. I would write my
paragraph, then start cutting. I often
had to cut out half of what I originally wrote in order to meet his
requirements. So when I write today, I
cut, in honor of Mr. Field.
The third
figure on that mount would be Mrs. Harris.
She was my private speech teacher in college for two years, the time
leading up to my senior speech recital.
Mrs. Harris was a stickler, by definition, “one who insists on something
unyieldingly.” Now that’s the word for
Mrs. Harris. She demanded
excellence. I frankly was terrified of
her. Her words often sent me back to the
dorm in tears. I once unwittingly failed
to meet her expectations. My notebook
that day said in huge capital letters, “James 4:17, To him that knoweth to do
good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.
When I tell you to do something, don’t rebel!” I slowly learned that what to me seemed
unreasonable, was designed to draw my best from me.
It is
because of Mrs. Harris that I am today a college speech teacher. She first persuaded me to change my major
from interpretative speech to speech education with an interpretative
proficiency, that while I insisted I didn’t want to be a teacher. In addition, it was she who persuaded me to
apply for graduate school for a master’s in interpretative speech. You cannot get a job as a college teacher
without a master’s degree.
In
graduate school came my fourth figure, Mrs. Edwards. I had Mrs. Edwards in undergrad for two
classes, but in graduate school she took her place on Mt. Rushmore. If Mrs. Harris represented discipline and
excellence, Mrs. Edwards represented compassion and excellence. In addition to classes such as Advanced
Interpretation of Poetry, Mrs. Edwards was my faculty advisor and private
instructor for my graduate project, an hour-long monodrama, researched,
written, memorized, and performed under her guidance. Those two years were difficult for a number
of reasons, but I had Mrs. Edwards. She
also insisted on excellence, but with a rare understanding of other things in
my life. She prayed with me, allowed me
to weep, sympathized with me, then pushed me past that to perform.
There are
the four faces on my Mount Rushmore of Teachers, Mrs. Sywalka, Mr. Field, Mrs.
Harris, and Mrs. Edwards. They were all
very different, but all a part of my shaping.
As a teacher today, I want to be on someone’s Mount Rushmore. I want to influence my students as these four
influenced me. Hurrah for Mount
Rushmore!
~~Faith Himes Lamb
