Emmanuel Martin
Instructor, Stephenson High School
Abraham Lincoln once said, "All I am or ever hope to be I owe to my sainted mother." At least, I think he said that. I've never seen the quotation attributed to him anywhere, and the only person I ever heard quote it was my own mother. The saying applies well to me; without meaning disparagement to my wife, friends and teachers who helped shape me. They inherited a work in progess whose broad outlines had already been sketched in by his mother.
I started first grade under a cloud; my speech was so think and slurred no one could understand me but my sister, who sometimes deliberately mistranslated me to others. My grandmother suggested having my tongue "clipped," an operation to sever the tissue connecting my tongue to the floor of my mouth. This, in theory, would "free up" my speech. I also had a tendency to write from right to left rather than the more conventional left to right. Oh, the jolly times my first grade teacher had regaling the class when she handed back papers. "Who is Nam Nitram?" she would ask innocently, and everyone would laugh but me. Our literature book, More Fun with Dick and Jane, although a masterwork of minimalism, failed to hold my boyish attention, and I passed my time drawing pictures. My teacher did not look favorably when she called on me to read and discovered I didn't know the place. I discovered that sitting in the back row, putting my hands in my pockets and scrunching down in my desk, she seldom noticed me.
My teacher thought I was retarded, these days she would say 'intellectually impaired', and put me forward for a battery of tests. Luckily, my mother was herself a special education teacher. Eschewing the gritty realism of Dick and Jane, Mother taught me to read using Mad magazine and "Peanuts" cartoons. She had me make up stories to dictate to her. When these were finished, I read them back to her.
In this way my mother incidentally imparted love of cartoons to me, but her own tastes in literature are more traditional. She reads avidly and can recite by heart volumes of poetry, a thing she will do at the smallest opportunity. On stormy nights, she would usher her children onto the back porch to watch the play of lightning in the sky and recite "Invictus." "Out of the night that covers me..." In a different mood, she would sing hymns to us, "I see the stars, I hear the roaring thunder..." She read aloud to us the passage from The Once and Future King where Mordred kills a unicorn and showed us the goosebumps on her arm from the effect of White's prose. Every morning she got us out of bed with the following verse, "The Lark is up to meet the sun/ The Bee is on the Wing/ The Ant her labor has begun/The Woods with music ring/Would you be wise...?" I don't know how the rest of the poem goes because I never let her get any farther than that. I was always out of bed screaming by then.
Because of my early exposure to cartoons, m first ambition was to be a cartoonist; for seven years I drew the syndicated comic strip, "Sibling Rivalry," for Universal Press Syndicate. When at last I turned to teaching high school English, I found my mother had left her imprint there as well. I continue to have a great regard for the traditional works of literature. It is hard to dismiss "dead white males" when you have seem their fascination for at least one very much alive female.
The students who most endear themselves to me are not the brightest, although I like those, too; they're the ones who sit scrunched down in the back with their hands in their pockets and draw airplanes on their notebooks. My mother always said, "It's not the perfect ones who get to you; it's the ones who hate school. They need you." My mother not only loved and sympathized with the troubled kids, she admired them. "They go to school every day for twelve years. Every day. They go even longer than the other kids because they're the ones who end up in summer school. And every day the teachers frown at them and remind them how bad they are. And every day all the other kids are smarter than them and understand what's going on when they don't.
They put up with this every day, and they keep coming back. They're the bravest people in the school; they have to be or they wouldn't be able to take it.
This is my second year teaching, and while I love it, I have inherited from my mother a certain skepticism about the profession. "Most teachers are exactly one grade level smarter than their students and no more," she was fond of saying, a peculiar remark coming from someone who taught eighth graders reading at a second grade level. Another of her pet sayings was, "Grades don't predict anything worthwhile, not success, not love, not happiness. They only predict future grades." This was not an entirely comforting thought to someone bringing home "D's" and "F's," but it stuck with me. I try to keep these thoughts in mind when I begin to feel the Godlike authority of Educator.
The irony that I, the biggest misfit in my first grade class, ended up becoming a teacher does not escape me. I frequently feel as if I've been cast in the leading role from the old TV series "Welcome Back Kotter." I wonder sometimes what bizarre spin on the Wheel of Fortune landed me of all people as an English teacher. Then I remember what Abraham Lincoln said, and I know the answer. Sometimes karma can be a real mother.
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