A Dickens of a teacher

A while back I wrote about an awful teacher I had in high school and now I want to balance the scales, I am a Libra after all, and write about a great teacher I had in middle school.

Let me set the scene for you. It was fall 1973, my mother had passed away earlier that year, and I was still adjusting to life at Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery's house, as were my sister and my two brothers. We were all trying to figure out where we fit in the pecking order with my aunt and uncle's kids and the other foster kids they had in the house. My aunt loved to take in foster kids for a couple of reasons, the first being that she liked to have lots of people to control and to order around and the second reason was she wanted her friends and peers to see what a "charitable" person she was.

We, my siblings and I, were also going through a pretty severe culture shock. We had lived all our lives up to that point in the fast paced city of Detroit but there we were in rural Livingston County living on a farm.

They finished building Highlander Way Middle School in Howell, Michigan some time in mid 1973 and I was among the first students who went there that fall. I was kind of shy then and I felt really out of place when the school year started. I was convinced my cousin, Cousin Idiot, hated me and was going to kill me or maim me because he was, and still is to some degree, psychotic. It did no good to report his abuse of me because his parents always sided with him no matter what, so school was one place where I got to be shed of him for a good part of the day for most of the year.

Consequently I loved going to school. I loved getting off that farm for 8 hours a day and I loved not being around my nutty ass cousins and their parents. For a few blessed hours I got to be around sane people who did not shout at or try to pick fights with me.

It was during that year when I had the great fortune to have had Mrs. Platt as my English teacher, though I think they called what she taught "language arts." She was a round little woman with a big laugh and a head full of brown hair that she kept in a bun piled loosely on her head. She wore glasses and I seem to recall her wearing sweaters even if it was 80 degrees outside. She also had a passion for teaching and a love of books and of reading that was infectious, well she infected me with it anyway. I'll always love her for telling our class one day that it was okay to read and that the "cool" people were the ones who read books and magazines and stayed on top of the news and things. Since I had just lost my mother a few months earlier Mrs. Platt was my ideal replacement mother figure because she was warm, friendly, and she loved it when we read and asked questions. She was in every way the polar opposite of my crazy control freak rageaholic aunt who wanted us to clean her big farmhouse more than she wanted us to do our homework and to read for pleasure. I hated to see the end of the school day come because that meant that I had to leave nice Mrs. Platt who I adored and go back to my crazy overbearing aunt's home.

Another reason I'll always love Mrs. Platt is because on some days she'd wheel in a film projector and she'd show us movies in class. She'd show us great old black and white movies from the 1930's, 40's and 50's. I remember seeing many a film adaptation of Charles Dickens novels on those film days.
And she also screened for us some great old British comedy shorts. I must have developed my love of British humor in her class. Towards the end of the school year someone in our class complained to their parents that she had shown us a movie where one kid called another kid an "silly ass" and they made her stop showing us films, I was pretty steamed at whoever squealed. But Mrs. Platt took it in stride becasue she was a professional.

I used to wish that I could go home with her and live with her family, even more so after I found out she had two teenage daughters, although just what I was going to do with them at age 11 was beyond me. Even though I never got to live with them and even though I only had Mrs. Platt for one year and even though we moved south in the summer of 1974, I'll always have Mrs. Platt with me. I feel like she's over my shoulder every time I read a book or watch a British comedy. I've had good teachers but to me Mrs. Platt was the only great one I ever had.