Tribute to Mrs. Gunderson

Rich (Vertical Mechanism) wrote such a moving tribute to his grade-school teacher the other day. It was inspiring and made me think of all the positive contributions teachers can make to society beyond sharing their knowledge of any particular subject to a younger generation. They can make a lasting impact.

My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Gunderson, was old school. She was an old-school hag, a relic of a long-dead educational system that held up fear and punishment as ideal tools for teaching the young. She wore black orthopedic shoes and scratchy wool suits, and her hair was pulled tightly up in a bun. If she had been an animal, she would have been a hawk with her beaked nose and her caw-like voice, screeching over the room with outstretched wings and prey-hunting talons.

Mrs. Gunderson taught the subject matter by the book with no need for creative embellishment. Learn the material, keep your mouths shut, and sit still. In her desk drawer, she kept a hand paddle made of wood which was conveniently the size of a child's palm, and when someone misbehaved they would be instructed to put their hands out in front, palms up, and be ready to receive their due whacks.

In the third grade, I was a bit of a lost soul. I was smart enough to do the work, and I was social enough to have plenty of little friends on the playground. But sitting at that desk all day being squeezed into that mathematics book and those readers--eek--I lost my ability to function as expected. If we were given twenty minutes to complete the reading worksheet, I would sit diligently answering the questions with pencil to paper for five, and then I would spend the rest of the quiet time imagining something better--I would dream up a horse ride or think of what joy would come from being a concert pianist in Carnegie Hall. When the twenty minutes was up, and I had not completed the assignment, I would be sent home with homework. In those days, in the early 70s, third graders weren't expected to have homework. If you had homework, it meant you were slow, or at best a day-dreamer. I preferred Day Dreamer. (see #10 on the 100 Thing About Me list).

After a couple of months of mind-wandering and shame of homework, Mrs. Gunderson suspended my playground privileges. While all the other children would be taken to the park for recess, I would be left alone in the room to do my work. It might have been a successful plan had she not also suspended Curt Hannah's recess fun. Curt Hannah was a mischievous little boy who often got the paddle. He was so uncooperative, that he was sentenced to in-room "recess" with me day after day.

Our school was built around a courtyard, and all the inside windows opened out onto it. There were animals in this courtyard--a couple of bunnies, a goat, and a horse that the country girl would sometimes ride to school. While the rest of the class was with the Hawk out on the swings and jungle gyms, Curt and I would raid lunch sacks and feed the apples to the horse and the goat. We ran wild like woodsy children, hopping from desk top to desk top. We drew pictures on the big green chalk board that we scrambled to erase before the class came back in. And we laughed with unharnessed glee. At the end of the recess period, when our assignments remained incomplete, we were reprimanded--I would be scolded, and Curt would get the paddle. We were kept inside for nearly the entire school year, and it became my favorite time of day.

If some well-meaning adult would have bent to my eye level and asked, "What is your favorite subject, little girl?" I would have said, "Recess with Curt Hannah."

So, here's to Mrs. Gunderson. I'm grateful that she gave me a scolding instead of a paddling. I'm grateful that she gave me recess in doors and was thoughtful enough to include a playmate. And I'm grateful that in the fourth grade, the school was annexed by the high school so that I went to a different elementary school with a whole new set of teachers. I lost my playmate and the courtyard, but I did well. And not once did I get the paddle.