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Community Corner

Back to School: Unforgettable Lessons from Third Grade

A real housewife looks at life in McLean.

I learned about books and their covers – about beauty and heart -- on the first day of third grade many years ago.

Unlike McLean, which reveals class assignments on the Thursday before school starts, New Rochelle, N.Y. paired teachers with their students – NBA draft style -- on opening day.

We kids would squirm in cafeteria seats, new sweaters itching and shoes pinching, while the teachers lined the wall; the veterans catching up on gossip, the fledglings eager to put theory into practice. We’d eye each other curiously, imagining who would occupy seven hours of our day for the next school year.

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By third grade, I already knew a lot about life and school.

I knew I could survive from 7:30 to 3 without my mother, who walked me down the dirt path to school on the first day of kindergarten, then presumed I could go it alone thereafter.  

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I knew my parents always would side with my teacher in any dispute, and that complaining about one adult to another was fruitless.

And I knew my straight-backed perfection during the first week of school would eventually dissolve into my true study habits – papers spilling from my notebook, old homework and empty raisin boxes littering my plaid book bag.

What I hadn’t figured out at age 8 was the misleading connection between outsides and insides, between a pretty face and an open heart.

Mrs. Katz was about to teach me.

As the cluster of third grade teachers moved to the front of the room, I spotted Mrs. Katz, a willow with a midnight French twist. While the veterans wore cardigans and skirts, Mrs. Katz, a first-year teacher, poured herself into a snug, black shift. She was Audrey Hepburn in a room of Judi Denches. And I was smitten.

“Dear God," I prayed, "let Mrs. Katz be mine.”

I had never considered myself lucky, but when I landed Mrs. Katz and was leader of the line of 28 kids, I thought, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

And I was right.

After the last 8-year-old was called into the line, Mrs. Katz leaned low so we all were eye-to-eye, raised her red-polished finger to her lips, and said with menacing diction, “I don’t want to hear ONE WORD in the hallway.”

Third grade went downhill from there.

It turned out that Mrs. Katz didn’t like kids much, and I particularly got under her skin. She held my 100% math test off the bulletin board because, “It’s not neat enough.”

As I stumbled over a spelling word, she sneered, “Guess again.”

And when timid Edith copied my poem word for word, Mrs. Katz accused me of cheating then bristled when I started my defense with, “Look, ….” a construction she found unforgivably disrespectful.

I know children have suffered worse at the hands of a new teacher. But my crush made each jibe more crushing. I had never felt such contempt from an adult, and I had never been so wrong about a person.

Things came to a head between Mrs. Katz and me when I interrupted her in the teachers’ lounge, needing to retrieve my piano book from our classroom for a lunchtime lesson. She handed me the door key and hissed, “Don’t let this happen again.”

That was it. I grabbed my book, ran home, and for the first time cried out my anguish to my mother.

“She hates me,” I sobbed. “I can’t go back.”

Of course, I did go back armed with a note from mother asking to discuss “the difficulties between you and Lisa.”  When I handed the request to Mrs. Katz, she looked at me all soft and concerned.

“What difficulties?”

I stood paralyzed before this beauty and beast, chewing my cheek to stop tears leaking out. On a dime, Mrs. Katz’s concern turned to disgust.

“You kids turn on the water works whenever you feel like it. Go sit down.”

I survived third grade – we all do -- and moved onto Mrs. Taibi, Mrs. Meir and Mrs. Hull, all lovely women and experienced teachers with whom I had ups and downs, but never the crushing defeat I experienced in the third grade.

A couple of years later, I passed Mrs. Katz in the hall and noticed her exit strategy bulging from a maternity blouse. She was about to leave teaching and become a mother.

I imagined the baby in her arms, gazing at her pretty face, touching her shiny black hair and thought, “Poor bastard.”

Lisa Kaplan Gordon writes about her real life every Wednesday.

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