Author: Phyllis Swartz

Alvina is the star of my book Yoder School. She taught me in first grade the most important lesson of my education—that learning is magical. And she made this lesson so convincing that a decade later, when I sat in high school chemistry where the wall clock seemed to take a minute to tick a second, I was sure that with different teaching, chemistry could crackle.

When Alvina taught, time melted away. Suddenly, it was lunch, and I had spent the morning messing around, trying to solve a puzzle and find the right word for my journal and make something cool. All morning, my tasks had kept bringing my energy back to me.

As a child I thought Alvina’s joy-filled teaching must have come from a burden-free life.

I didn’t know that Alvina had followed the horse-drawn wagon carrying casket of her little sister to the graveyard. And that not long after, her father had taken ill, becoming so weak he could no longer pick her up, that he died a few weeks before Easter, and that her mother was so distraught, she passed out at the funeral.

I didn’t know that Alvina’s teacher training had been accelerated because of the World War II teacher shortage. Even her trip to college was fraught. The train being filled with soldiers, she stood or sat on her suitcase for nearly twelve hours. Once at college, she took classes at almost twice the normal rate. A case of mumps placed her in such a strict quarantine that she wasn’t allowed to touch books or paper or pencils. So, although her friend sat on a pile of dirt outside her window to read history lessons to her, Alvina couldn’t take notes. And she earned a D in history.

I didn’t know Alvina entered her first year of teaching thinking she had no idea of how to teach, that she was scared but couldn’t tell anyone because, after all, she had been to college. And her first teaching years weren’t easy. When Alvina started teaching at Yoder, it was a one-room school. One year she taught forty-seven students spread across seven grades.

All I knew is that teaching seemed to be a glorious adventure for Alvina. And that I wanted to be a teacher like her.

Not until a couple decades into my teaching did I learn that Alvina’s exemplary teaching didn’t come from a pain-free childhood, an exemplary teacher-training program, or ideal teaching conditions.

Best views, after all, come after hard climbs.

There’s a grammar rule you’ve probably never broken, not once. At least none of my students ever did.

They might have come to class saying, “I ain’t got my homework done, Mrs. Swartz.”

But when it came to ablaut reduplication, they never messed up.

Tip top, they’d say, never top tip.

They’d say Kit Kat and chit chat and jibber jabber and clip clop. They followed the ablaut reduplication rule without thinking because the other way—top, tip and chat chit—just sounds wrong.

So I never explained the rule to them. We never discussed that in these repeating kind of words, the first word always uses i as its inside vowel and that the second word uses an a or an o. My students never understood that a mouth makes i’s in the front and a’s and o’s further back, and that, for English speakers, a mouth works easier from the front to the back.

In bringing rhythms to language, what comes first matters.

And it matters in teaching, though how to begin doesn’t come so naturally.

For too many years, I got it wrong. Teaching, I reasoned, is about growth of the mind. And so I’d begin by offering a concept to my students. This would intrigue them, I reasoned, draw them in.

But the rhythms of my classes were off. I was working the hard way, by engaging the head first.

I should have remembered the example of my professor in a graduate-level statistics class. I walked into that class with a giant-sized pit in my stomach.

“How many of you are dreading this class?” the professor asked.

And it was all of us.

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “I failed statistics twice in college. And when I figured out why, I decided to teach statistics—and in a way students can understand it, actually like it.”

She had us.

Even in a class as logic laden as statistics, she knew the right order: the heart first, and then the head.

I spent a day and a night in an emergency room chair. My ninety-three-year-old mother had fallen and her brain scan showed a small bleed. So a steady stream of nurses and doctors kept checking on her.

“Grip my hands,” they’d say to her.

Without fail, their faces registered surprise at the strength of her clutch. But she hadn’t hand-milked cows before and after school all through her childhood for nothing.

“What’s your secret,” they kept asking, “for staying so young?”

And so she told them that on the days she felt old she walked the fastest.

And she gave credit for this to a teacher.

“When I was in sixth grade,” she said, “our teacher taught us that to stay healthy, we should keep our spines straight when we sat at our desks. And we should move.”

This teacher showed them how to move. She told them to put books on their heads. And they marched around the room keeping those books balanced.

“March faster,” the teacher would say. And then, “Still faster.”

“Well,” the nurse said, “I do believe in mobility as medicine.”

That phrase had a nice ring to it, so I looked it up. And I discovered it’s a campaign to help people in healthcare facilities move safely and more.

After the nurse heard that my mom climbs stairs every day—to the basement for laundry, to the second story to visit my dad in his office, and to the attic to sort through relics of her past—she was convinced my mom didn’t need to move more.

This still left some questions about safety, as her raised eyebrow showed.

But what impressed the nurse most was the teacher.

“Imagine,” she said, “teaching a thirteen-year-old something she will remember 80 years later.”

Snow days not being what they used to be, I feel sorry for kids these days. For one thing, the news that school’s out comes too easily.

“I just check my email,” my fourth-grade granddaughter told me.

That’s not how it was when I was a kid. When we woke to a world quieted and brightened by snow, my brothers and I huddled around the big radio cabinet in our kitchen with the dial turned precisely to 600 AM, WTAC. Wrapped in blankets, we’d wait through news about the Vietnam War and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Michigan Wolverines basketball game and weather. And finally came the school closings.

We wished as hard as we could as the radio announcer listed closed schools.

“Atherton,” he’d say, and “Carmen-Ainsworth and Beecher and Davidson.”

We’d hear papers rustling, and he’d call Fenton and Flushing and Genesee and Clio. When he made Clio sound like a period at the end of the list, we’d groan.

But in the background, we’d hear the station phone ring.

“And this just in,” he’d say.

Bendle, I’d think, let it be Bendle.

And when it was, the world seemed to pause. No one had plans for us, not our teachers, not our parents. So we made snow angels and sledded down the hill in Kearsley Park and made a little money shoveling driveways. We drank hot chocolate and read books.

Now the most my grandchildren can hope for is a non-traditional instruction day. They can stay in their pajamas, if they’d like, and drink hot chocolate. But they’re in front of the computer on Zoom or bent over paper packets of math and reading their teachers sent home the evening before, in hopes of snow.

This is why, on wintery days of bluster and ice, I feel sorry for kids these days.

Until, I remember that, no matter how much it snows, school days won’t be tacked onto those fair weather days in June.

He had two ears and one tongue—my Uncle Monroe.

At family reunions, he’d pat an empty chair next to him and ask me a question.

Amazing, his eyes would say, while I talked, tell me more.

So I did. And I came away from Monroe seeing the fascinations of my life.

Never mind that his stories were better than mine.

After all, he was the only human “guinea pig” I knew. As a conscientious objector during the Korean War, he was among the first volunteer normal-control patients in clinical studies at the National Institutes of Health. In one study, he and eleven others were kept awake so doctors could study the effects of sleep deprivation. What happened, Monroe told me, was strange. After a couple days, he and his study partners couldn’t talk straight and saw things that weren’t there. But, their bodies faring better than their minds, they could still play basketball.

I know this much, but I wish I had asked him more.

And not just about being a human guinea pig. What was it like for an Amish-Mennonite plowboy from the hills of western Maryland to earn a Ph.D. and to work in Manhattan at the New York University lab where moon rock was analyzed?

What was it like to serve on a bishop board and on a Head Start board and on a camp board?

And after 55 years in the Big Apple, how did it feel to retire in a cottage nestled into the hillside of a retirement village just miles from the fields he plowed as a boy?

With Monroe having asked the questions, I’ve missed my chance to hear more from him.

Instead I’ll mourn at his funeral today. But already I’ve heard stories from others who knew him.

“He was curious about my life,” they’ve been saying.

And this gift he gave to so many of us has now become our calling.

She had snowy-white hair and sat like a queen, turning her willow rocker into a throne. And we all came to pay her homage and drink her homemade root beer. As a child, her life seemed magical to me. Her job was to rock, and the job for the rest of us—her more than 85 children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—was to bring her coffee when she was thirsty and food when she was hungry and a shawl when she was cold and to smile and tell her a bit about our lives.

What I didn’t understand then and can’t fully appreciate still is the toll of her life. By the time I knew her, she had borne seventeen children, including two sets of triplets, and buried five babies and a husband. She had pinched pennies during the economic panic of the 1890s and the Great Depression. She had lived through the Great War and the 1918 flu pandemic and World War II and the smallpox epidemic.

And she had worked hard. Year after year, her diaries record massive food preservation—canning 32 batches of cranberries in one day after gathering them from a bog at Bup Beitzel’s farm and another day 41 quarts of pork and 30 quarts of beef from livestock she had raised. In one week 300 quarts of tomatoes came from her garden. She heated water over a fire for washing clothes with soap she made from lye and lard.

My granddaughter Anna shares a name with my great-grandma of the snowy-white hair. And a birthday. Both born on September 24, though 129 years apart, their lives will be starkly different. My granddaughter Anna will likely never make soap with lye and lard or grow a garden that produces 300 quarts of tomatoes. But when she runs cross country, I can see that she’s got the pluck of my great-grandma. Which is good. She’ll need it for what lies before her in the twenty-first century, though I can’t quite envision what that might be.

I hate going to the dentist. I know I shouldn’t say this aloud, especially around my grandchildren, but I spent this morning in dread, knowing I had two deep cavities that would require a cap removal and fillings and two possible root canals. I wasn’t looking forward to the numbing needle thrust deep into my gum and the laughing gas that makes me all loopy and the grinding, the shrill, high-pitched sound of the drill, and the continual requests to open wider, wider, still wider, please.

So I turned to history, as I often do to get a perspective when I need one.

I could be heading to the barber shop, I told myself to have my teeth yanked out by a burly barber or to a smithy where a blacksmith would do the job with a pair of pliers. Or I could be walking into one of the first dentists’ offices where they used chisels and hammers to knock out a bad tooth. With these tools, the force needed to jerk a tooth from the gums often caused the tooth to break leaving embedded roots and tooth parts behind.

Even the privileged suffered. The face of Queen Elizabeth I was often swollen from gum abscesses, and the teeth that weren’t missing from her mouth were yellowed and so uneven her speech was hard to understand. And George Washington lost his teeth, replacing them, not with wood as you read in children’s stories, but with teeth extracted from animal and human corpses.

For a nice pair of dentures, you held out for human teeth. But the less privileged classes of Britain couldn’t afford these dentures, not until after the Battle of Waterloo. The bodies of tens of thousands of the soldiers who died in that battle, were stripped not just of valuables but also of teeth. These teeth shipped to Britain in barrels were made into affordable dentures known as Waterloo teeth.

Being a wimp for any kind of pain, I need to find ways to gird myself up. And history usually helps. Thinking about Waterloo teeth took my mind off the drilling. Almost.

From my family to yours

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t harass each other on Twitter or Instagram. But we found our own way. We called it the Slam Book. It was a notebook passed among students when the teacher turned to write on the chalkboard.

The keeper of the book wrote questions on the tops of pages—questions like Who is the most unpopular boy in the class? Or Who won’t get a date to prom? or even What do you hate about Emma Jean? And in the guise of writing an English report or doing quadratic equations, students would leaf through the pages, writing their comments.

The Slam Book never landed on some kids’ desks. Maybe because their names were in it. Maybe because they weren’t really part of the class. Maybe because nobody cared what they thought. But those kids, especially, watched as the book made its way up and down the rows. And if the book lay carelessly open on someone’s desk, their eyes strained to see what they dreaded to find—their names.

The Slam Book had the power to hurt. It spread rumors and ridiculed the weak and destroyed relationships. But unlike the social media of today, its influence was physically limited to one classroom in one school. And it took only one alert teacher to destroy it.

But now Snapchat and Facebook can reach far beyond the classroom, sending out humiliation for all the world to see. Once public, the damage can be amplified with comments and further sharing.

I don’t think kids are getting worse. With some time-travel, the bullies of my childhood could take on the bullies of today. But there’s a difference. Today’s social media tools are more potent. And the challenge for my grandchildren and their generation is to use these tools to build people up and bring them together, not to pull people down and tear them apart.