Author: Phyllis Swartz

Last week, my husband lost his little sister. Though they didn’t share genes, she called him Brother. Afterall, she lived in the Swartz home for almost four decades, having arrived when she was six years old. She came out of the Lapeer State Home, first known as the Michigan Home for the Feeble-Minded.

At the funeral, the word feeble did not come to mind. Dorell created her own definition of Down syndrome. Not a victim, she saw herself as the maker of her fate, always looking for ways to revamp reality until it corresponded to her dreams of how things should be. 

And so she took a developmental education course at a community college. She worked on the hospitality team at Taco Bell, greeting customers and wiping tables. Wanting to be a mother, she adopted a child from Compassion International. And she celebrated her own heritage, decorating her room with Cherokee-style blankets and pillows and wall hangings.

At the first Swartz reunion after our two children were married, Dorell asked my husband to call our family together.

“Got something to tell the new ones,” she said.

As Dorell directed, we sat in chairs facing her.

“You need to know,” she told our new children-in-law, “that I’m the aunt and you’re the niece and nephew. That I am in the generation above you, and you’re below me. And that you should treat me with respect.”

They agreed. And to record the promise, she brought out a paper for them to sign.”

Dorell came to the Swartz home in the early seventies when the Department of Mental Health began downsizing state institutions like the Lapeer State Home, which at its height housed over 4000 residents, making it one of the largest such facilities in the world.

It was Dorell’s fortune to move from this segregated asylum into the Swartz home.

But it was also the fortune of the Swartzes, as anyone could tell by the tributes at her funeral.

And if she had heard what we said, she’d have nodded her head, accepting the truth that she showed us all how to take courage in hand and think big and reach far.

A few summers ago, I visited the fighting swamp. When I closed my eyes, I could feel, once again, the charge in the air just before a fight. I could hear it: fists thudding, fighters grunting, and bystanders cheering.

“We’ll take this to the swamp,” Frank would say to Jerry after sharp words at school.

And Jerry had to show up. Otherwise, kids would call him a chicken all week.

The fighting swamp was five blocks from school, on the corner of Webber and Columbine—far enough to keep the teachers away, even though the muck and snakes and poison sumac should have been enough. Word of the fight always spread, and dozens of kids would ring the swamp, waiting for the fight.

Just before the first punch, the fighters would circle each other, fists bunched, jaws clenched, chins up.

“Come on. Give me a punch. Throw me one!” they’d taunt each other.

And finally someone would. It was during this circling phase that I once stepped into the middle. And it’s because Frank was taunting Tommy.

Tommy was my friend. He carried my books, and wrote nice notes, and back in third grade, offered me a plastic ring he won from a toy slot machine. I didn’t take it. Not because I didn’t like Tommy. I just wasn’t ready to get serious in third grade.

Fighting Frank in the swamp was the last thing Tommy wanted to do. And just as Frank bunched up his fists, something came over me. I stepped in between Frank and Tommy.

“This is stupid,” I said to Frank. “You only fight if you aren’t brave enough or smart enough to settle it some other way.”

There I stood. I was a little Mennonite girl with long braids, a modest skirt, thick dark glasses, and associated with God. I was quite certain I wouldn’t get hit.

The swamp grew silent. Tommy’s fists went down. So did Frank’s. Nobody, including me, knew quite what to do next. So we all went home.

In the sixty years since that day in the swamp, many of my peacemaking efforts have failed.

But that day, my friend Tommy didn’t get punched.

Our grandsons knew exactly where they were going. We followed them, down the aisle of the sanctuary to the pew that seemed to be theirs.

My husband broke protocol and leaned over me to whisper to them.

“Cows know where to go for their milking,”

And though our grandsons have never worked in a dairy barn, they knew what he meant.

We talked about this later at lunch. It’s not just at church that people seem to own their seats. On the school bus, in the lunchroom, and in classrooms, people claim places, even if they aren’t officially assigned.

Most students care where they sit. And they have a plethora of reasons. They want front seats to focus, back seats to see the whole room, middle seats to be among their friends, along-the-wall seats to feel safe.

No matter the desired vantage point, people like to establish personal territory in shared spaces. Usually, others tacitly assent. But when this unspoken rule is broken, I’ve seen students nearly come to blows.

Not all students have altruistic motives for seating choices. Some want to sleep or chat or daydream. But I’ve found that usually students are glad to be guided to the place where they learn best.

Some of my students stood at a counter in the back of the class, others pushed a desk up to mine. After some false tries, one of my seventh-grade students found his place under my podium. Closed in by three sides, he churned out excellent work, raising his letter grade by two in one marking period.

Cows in my grandfather’s milking barn knew their stanchions to be good places. There they found chopped grain in their troughs, water when their noses pushed a lever in their bowls, and relief from the heavy bags of milk they carried. In their stanchions, they could let go and breathe easy. 

And this is how students settle in when they find ideal spots for learning.

I once learned some rules that I now break with relish. Don’t mark in books or read while you eat. Don’t take them to beaches or into the bath. Don’t dog-ear corners or crack open spines or lay books face down on the bedside stand. A respect for books—this was the aim of the well-meaning teachers and book-saving librarians who taught me these rules.

It’s good these rule makers haven’t come to my study, where well-thumbed books fill the shelves.

They’d find volumes with food stains and water marks. Many have bent pages and worn-down covers. And a few have cracked spines and can now open wide.

And if they leafed through the chapters, they’d be able to tell that I read with a pencil—drawing arrows to link concepts, asterisks by sentences I like, exclamation points when I’m surprised, and question marks when I disagree. When I find scenes or points particularly striking, I draw vertical lines

In the margins I note striking themes and linguistic tools—irony, symbolism, juxtaposition, tone. And on front and back flyleaves, I copy favorite quotes.

Such markings alter the nature of reading, transforming it into dialogue. And months later when I pick up a book, I remember—the author’s thoughts, but also my own.

These are my books, of course, not yours, not the library’s. I love to borrow. But when I do, I sometimes stop reading a few chapters in. I return the book and buy my own copy. And when it arrives, I start over again in dialogue form.

Marking a book, I’ve come to see, is not mutilation. It’s a sign of regard. I’m paying attention, considering, engaging, which is, of course, what teachers and librarians want.

My dad quit school after seventh grade. Not that he wanted to, but his church thought seven grades was enough, that more education might take him away from the simple life and make him worldly. My dad was glad enough to be out of school that first summer. He wanted to run barefoot on the farm.

But this feeling changed one morning in early September as he plowed the field across the knob, getting ready to plant winter wheat. Plodding in the furrow behind Bob and Fern, the draft horses, he noticed bonnets and straw hats bobbling along the country road.

It’s the first day of school, he thought, and I won’t go to school ever again.

He wished in secret that someone would make the Amish Mennonites obey the law about going to school until age sixteen. But he knew he wouldn’t complain. This was the way of his people. He would learn at home like his father who read the Bible, and magazines like Newsweek, Farm Journal, and the Herold der Wahrheit. He would read his father’s books of poetry and theology and history.

Having settled this, he said, “Giddup!” to the horses. He gripped the plow handles, and field length by field length, row by row, he turned the fresh earth.

***

I sometimes think about that barefoot boy when I walk into my dad’s study for our daily visit. He’s no longer barefoot, no longer plowing fields. But he’s still holding to the contract he made with himself—to keep learning

He read the books in his boyhood home. And later, after I was born and the church opened the doors, he went back to school. Not hanging on his walls, but somewhere in his files are two diplomas—one for a bachelor’s degree, the other for a master’s.

Now at ninety-one, he still spends most of the day in his book-filled study.

“Guess what I’ve discovered,” he often says to me when I walk in.

That’s my dad.

***

You can learn more about my dad in my memoir, Yoder School.

Some of the best teachers I’ve known had tough first years.

Take a fresh-from-college guy we’ll call George. I helped to interview George, and I could tell he cared, genuinely cared about students. He meant all the right things he said in the interview—that he once had a teacher who changed the direction of his life and that he wanted to make this sort of difference for students he taught. He was a hard worker, he told us, wouldn’t mind staying up late to critique student writing. And he believed in taking one for the team of teachers he hoped to join.

So we recommended George. But for much of the year he wished we hadn’t.

The workload overwhelmed him. He couldn’t keep up with the ever-growing stacks of papers to be graded. He came to school on Monday mornings, exhausted by late Sunday-night lesson planning, and for every office form he completed, two more appeared.

Still, he might have been able to handle the work if he could have managed the kids. George made the classic first-year teacher mistake. Determined not to be a teacher with a brittle voice and snapping eyes, he came bearing gifts. And when constant chatter and paper wads and general unruliness turned him from a Santa Claus to a Scrooge, students revolted.

But five years later, George was still teaching. In fact, the principal was sending new teachers to his classroom to see how it’s done. And when those newbies watched George teach, they saw not only what worked. They also saw what George had learned from what hadn’t work. In education we call this reflective practice.

The longer I taught and watched others teach, the more I came to believe that the main difference between good teachers and bad teachers is that good teachers know when they’re bad. Then they do something about it.

After I put my small garden to bed last fall, I needed something for my hands. Something not related to a keyboard. So I picked up a tool that’s new to me—a needle.

After casting about for a project, I found one—an embroidered autobiography. I bought a roll of twill tape and divided it into 12-inch sections, a foot for each year of my life. And all winter, this project was my reward at the end of a day of writing and caring for parents. While I listened to documentaries and books-on-tape and book reviews, I embroidered images of my life—three per year.

If you picked up this embroidered timeline, you’d find the cabin where I was conceived and Herman, the duck, who was once my dear friend but who became my enemy and so ended as dinner on my grandma’s table.

You’d see Rover, the dog, who was so patient with children that he stood meekly as my brother used my grandma’s butcher knife on his neck. You’d find the shaped notes I heard in church and the Casselman Bridge over the river where I played.

In my school years, you’d see symbols of the Duck-and-Cover drills during the Cold War and the metamorphosis of a monarch butterfly that emerged in my first-grade classroom. You’d notice the year we moved to Flint, Michigan, where I encountered the civil rights movement and the wonders of bookmobiles and of ice cream carts jangling down our street.

For me, the images of childhood came easy. Now, I’m moving on to the teenage years, when life becomes more abstract, more idea driven. But I’m finding images—symbols of New Math, a paddle to show corporal punishment in schools at that time, fires of the long, hot summer of 1967, and the cover of the Martyrs Mirror, for the year I couldn’t stop turning its pages.

And what will happen when I get to midlife on my timeline? Will the images keep coming? I hope so.

In the meantime, I’m stitching the moments that mattered most, marking my existence on cloth, seeing the patterns of my places in the world, and being soothed by color and fabric and the sliding in and out of a needle.

The book in my mom’s hands means something. I can tell by the way she holds it in two hands, as if she’s offering me a gift.

“We were waiting for you to be born,” she says, “when we bought this.”

I expect something like Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, which, at the time I was born was the second-best selling book next to the Bible.

I do not expect the title she shows me—Self-Taught Basic Algebra.

“Your dad and I both wanted to learn algebra,” she says. “So we bought this book. After supper we’d work the problems. Sometimes we didn’t stop until midnight.”

I imagine them hunched over the kitchen table, each with their pencil and paper, playing with letters and numbers and symbols, trying to find answers. They had no social media, no television, no radio. They didn’t spend an evening on the town, eating out and watching a movie.

But together they learned how to combine like terms and how to isolate all the unknowns on one side of an equation. They read about two trains leaving a town at the same time and traveling in opposite directions at the rates of 40 and 50 miles per hour. And they figured out how many hours it would take until the trains were exactly 270 miles apart.

Having this much fun until midnight must have cost them during the next early-morning milking. But apparently it was worth it.

“Sometimes before going to bed, we’d get to laughing,” my mom says. “Laughing hard.”

Her eyes take on a dreamy look. And she chuckles again, remembering.

“We never did figure out,” she says, “why algebra did that to us.”

In education, we call this interbrain synchrony. It happens when people cooperate to solve a problem. When two people’s neurons fire together for an evening of puzzling, they find each other on the same wavelength, and it feels mighty good.

I ask to borrow Self Taught Basic Algebra. I want to leaf through its pages and imagine how my parents spent those evenings together as they waited for me to be born.

“Make sure you bring this back,” my mom says, when she hands it to me.

And I will. Maybe they’ll want to review some algebra.

Big eyes stare at me from the attic trunk. For more than sixty years now, ever since I painted them in first grade, these eyes have watched from behind their glasses. The eyes belong to Alvina, my first teacher. And I painted them in her classroom at Yoder School.

In my portrait, Alvina is a force—all-seeing eyes, a mouth at the ready, and capable arms. Her eyes don’t miss a daydreaming student or the slump of shoulders when work is too hard. Her mouth can tell a line-cutting kid a thing or two. But it also makes stories live when she reads aloud, stories from books and stories we write. Her arms build a grocery store for us in the corner of the classroom and lift newly-hatched monarchs into the sky so they can find freedom.

At age seven, do I already have a growing inkling that Alvina will become the polestar me? For decades, she guided me as I explored new ideas and methods for teaching.

What would Alvina do? I asked this question hundreds of times as I taught middle schoolers and inmates and gifted students. The answers to this question often helped me assess, problem-solve, design and modify my practice.

I smooth the faded painting on its now brittle, yellowed easel paper. My first-grade portrait of Alvina takes up the whole page, much like she filled my teaching life. But I’m retired now, and Alvina has died. In some ways, it’s over—the story of Alvina and how she taught me to teach.

But as I close the attic trunk, I have a thought. When Alvina retired, her story lived on in the next generation of teachers. And those teachers have tried pass it on to their students. It’s a strong story, strong enough to last another generation.

***

Read more about Alvina in my book Yoder School.