Mister Know-it-all

Mr. Know-it-all

“I wasn't expecting that!” And it almost cost me my job!

Some stuff you need to know before I tell you how “that” happened. I was 29 years old. I got my bachelor's degree in English education from New Jersey State College.  I had been teaching for four years in Hackettstown High School, New Jersey—seniors. I know everything there is to know about teaching seniors in public high schools! Don't give me diagramming of sentences, nor did we have 25 vocabulary words every week— but I did demand my students learn how to write a sentence! Their homework was to read a book of their choice.

I happened to be teaching English in the 1960s and the federal government blessed me with keeping my student load at no more than 100 kids per five classes a day. Better than that, we could spend X amount of dollars for the purchase of curriculum materials—in my case, modern novels! Of course, I bought 21 copies of JD Salinger’s nine stories! Salinger speaks to me!

In the meantime, I was a citizen living in Hackettstown, New Jersey. This meant people were honking at you if you waited a nanosecond after the light turns green. You were risking your life getting on a major highway. You were stepping over bodies at the beach at the Jersey Shore, and during the winter you wouldn't see the sun for six weeks at a time—it was time for me to leave New Jersey!

I had a college friend who had moved to the Denver, Colorado area and found the weather and the drivers amiable. Being the fabulous English teacher that I was, I thought I could teach something to the people from the state of Colorado that they were missing because they didn't live in New England or California. I decided to move to the Denver metro area.

I applied to two school districts in Colorado—Boulder County and Jefferson County. I had never been to either place. When I contacted Boulder County to find out about my application, they told me they had lost it! Jefferson County offered me a job at Stoney Ridge High School—about 15 minutes from downtown Denver, they told me. I figured the people in Boulder County must be a bunch of hicks, losing my application and all—I took the job at Stoney Ridge.

Going to the middle of nowhere—somewhere in Colorado or in the Denver area whatever that was—I figured my students probably hadn't ever read Catcher in the Rye much less the Nine Stories. The point is that I needed to bring my 21 copies of Nine Stories with me to Colorado and Stony Ridge High School. Yes, I stole 21 paperbacks—crime for greater education!

Stony Ridge wasn't following the latest and greatest for high school English teachers and I had 25 kids or more in each of my five classes. And there was no money available to buy novels. I used the text—Harcourt Brace Jovanovich standard national English / language arts textbook for high schools.

I completed a successful fall semester and looked forward to teaching the Nine Stories after the Christmas holiday. I had to solve my problem of only in possession of 21 copies of my text. The title Nine Stories was the solution—I divided all my classes into nine groups per class. Then I used class time to pass the text around. I am a one-on-one composition teacher, and those people who we're not reading met me to complete a composition assignment.

You may be wondering, and yes, I was right— no one had read Catcher in the Rye or Nine Stories—nothing by JD Salinger. Before going forward, this is the time to divulge the socioeconomic class of students I was dealing with. I'm going to say middle to upper class. Many of the parents worked in downtown Denver which was a 15-minute drive away. Others commuted by automobile to Boulder, Colorado which is the home of the University of Colorado. Boulder was a town of professionals in terms of employment and drew other professionals in commuting distance to satisfy their need for employment. The other thing I had to say was that conservative Christianity was observed by many of my students and their families. The point I'm trying to make is that people from the East were more diversified and liberal in terms of religious belief and the use of profanity.

My teaching method in Hacketsville High School had been to divide the classes into nine groups each and give them the choice of presenting the book the way they wanted. Some read the story out loud to the class and offered discussion questions, others did some artwork also with discussion questions and a few presented their own short play as a reaction to the story they were assigned. I was using this same approach for the kids from Stony Ridge.

Three of the nine groups in one class decided to have one of their members read the story out loud. Nancy van Cliff was the reader from one of the groups during third period. I assessed Nancy to be from upper middle class hearing her and some of her friends talk about such and such Country Club. The story Nancy was to read was “For Esme with Love and Squalor.” Although Catcher in the Rye has a great deal of profanity, the short story “For Esme with Love and Squalor” had, in my mind, a negligible amount. Nancy was a girl who wore conservative skirts and blouses, had hair meeting the standard shoulder length and curled at the bottom. She wore no lipstick or makeup and although her fingernails were manicured, they displayed no polish. As I have previously mentioned, homework for my classes was always read a book of your choice. Nancy was an avid reader, but there was no indication that she had ever read Salinger. Nevertheless, I decided that because of her extensive reading, profanity would not be a problem for her to read out loud.   

Nancy began to read her story. You need to know that “For Esme with Love and Squalor” is about soldiers in England at the end of the World War II in England and one particular soldier, Sergeant X, who meets the title character, Esme. Sergeant X has a roommate, Clay. Sergeant X has been mentally disturbed and has unfortunate physical responses to the disturbance. His hands shake at times and the side of his face moves sometimes like a tic. Clay's world of words includes “goddam” and “bastard.” These words were not a new thing to my kids who had read Catcher in the Rye back in Stony Ridge. But probably most of my current students listening to Nancy, these words did not appear in anything they had been reading.

 Consequently, the first time Nancy used Clay's profane part of his world of words, there was a new silence in the listening of her fellow students. As Clay's profane language continued to be expressed verbally via Nancy, the silence grew louder and louder. Perhaps the silence was loudest when Nancy had Clay say, “Do you know the goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place?” Nancy, bravely, never veered from her perfect expression of meaning in the tone of her voice using Clay's profanity. It was as if Clay's language was Nancy's language as well!

Nancy finished the story and received a standing ovation! I have to say I was aghast at her reading also. The bell rang and, as in 99% of high school classes that are run by bells, the teacher does not need to say, “Class excused,” all the students just get up and leave! On the way out of class, Nancy hung back and came up to my desk. “Mr. Wisner, was my reading of the story okay?”. I stood up as I answered and said, “Nancy, you got a standing ovation! You did an amazing job reading that story!”

“Thank you, Mr. Wisner! That was the first time I ever swore!”