The Power of a Good Teacher

Today is the last day of Teacher Appreciation Week for 2023. In honor of teachers everywhere, I wanted to share my story of two teachers who made a difference in my life.

I was always “the new girl.” Since we left my home state of Minnesota when I was eight, I attended 14 elementary schools and seven high schools in nine states. By the time I graduated from high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1976, I had experienced the teaching styles of a multitude of teachers. Of all the teachers I had over those years, there are only two whose names I can remember, both of whom were from my middle school years. I would like you to meet them.

Mrs. Dragoo

To be fully transparent, I must admit that I may have remembered my teacher's name wrong. I recall it as Mrs. Dragoo, though it's possible it was actually Dragoon. Either way, she was my sixth-grade teacher in Osprey, Florida. The school in Osprey was very small. In fact, it was the smallest school I ever attended. At the time, there were four children in our family, and all of us attended Osprey School. My baby sister was in kindergarten class, while my brother was in second grade and my other sister was in fourth.

There was a room for each grade. The “hallway” was an open loggia from which you could see the shared playground. The Sarasota History Alive website describes the school, which was built in 1926, thusly: “The one-story, six-rooms-in-a-line school was laid out to take advantage of cross breezes for cooling. An exterior hallway on the west shaded classrooms from the afternoon sun.”

Beyond the playground was the house Mrs. Dragoo lived in — a big, old house that I remember as a victorian building with a wrap-around verandah. Goodness knows that my memory may not be accurate after 52 years!

Today, the school is the visitor center for the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens’ Historic Spanish Point campus. I don’t know if the old house is still standing. I have not been back to the school since we moved away right after that school year.

The first day I attended Osprey School was the first time I was so terrified of going into the new classroom that I cried. Mrs. Dragoo left her classroom full of students to talk with me and make me feel welcome. I’ll always remember her kindly for that.

Sixth grade was a formative year for me. The first Earth Day happened during that spring semester. It was exciting delving into environmental concerns for the first time. Our Girl Scout troop was led by my mother, who was quite pregnant with my baby brother when she took us all camping in pup tents.

My best friend Susie joined me in making up our own Girl Scout Cookie song as we walked around town selling those delicacies for fifty cents a box (yes, you read that right!)

“Buy Girl Scout Cookies today — the finest kind, the best tasting — buy Girl Scout Cookies today. Doo doo doo doo do do do.”

She and I used to daydream together about one of our shared tween heartthrobs, Jack Wild from H.R. Pufnstuf. Susie and I hung out with another girl, Kim. We were three blondes who pretended we were all “long-lost cousins.” Surprisingly, the other kids believed us.

All of these pleasant memories are wrapped up in my memories of Mrs. Dragoo. I suppose part of the reason I remember her name at all is that it was so unusual. It could be because I’ll never forget that she told us she went to college with Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on The Addams Family — one of my very favorite television shows.

Personally, I think I remember those details because I remember her so fondly. She was not only a good teacher but a kind soul who made a scared little girl feel at home in a strange place.

Moving to Atlanta

We left Osprey because my dad was offered a chef position in Atlanta. We packed everything up into a rental trailer and moved to Georgia that summer. We lived in a motel for a time while we waited for the previous tenants to move out of the house we were going to be renting.

I think my siblings and I met Keifer Sutherland at that motel, but we’ll probably never know for sure. This little blond kid was standing under a tree tossing a jackknife into the ground. He told us his name, but all I can remember was that it sounded like an odd name to me. Then he told us his dad was Donald Sutherland. I kind of knew that name; I knew Donald Sutherland was an actor, but that’s about all. I think we probably said something like “cool.” My sister and I moved on to something else, leaving my brother talking to the strange kid with the knife.

Living in a motel for a couple of weeks was a strange situation at the time, but it became weirder when we would move into the house while the previous tenants were still living there. Their new house wasn’t ready for them yet, but I suspect it was getting expensive to live in the motel.

I still remember those people’s last name and the fact that they had a daughter around my age named Carol. That’s about it. I don’t think it was too long before they left.

My baby brother was born while we were in that house. I experienced my first near miss with an overreaching father of some children I was babysitting just down the street from that house.

I turned 13 while we were living in that house, and fell in love with Donny Osmond and a boy named Billy (I won’t put his last name here just in case it would humiliate him should he stumble upon this missive). I let Billy copy off my papers in English and imagined him when I sang along with “Close to You” by the Carpenters. His favorite song was “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

I quit Girl Scouts, which I had been involved in since I was a Brownie because my Cadet Scout troop wanted to sit around and quilt instead of camping and going to Girl Scout Day in Underground Atlanta. I quit just in time to help chaperone my sister’s Junior troop to that event.

Mrs. Washington

My Social Studies class went on a field trip to the state capitol, where we were introduced to then-Governor Jimmy Carter in the hallway. Some of my classmates swooned because they thought he was “SO CUTE!!!” Funny the things we remember.

Mrs. Washington was my 7th-grade Social Studies teacher at Cary Reynolds Elementary School in Brookhaven, Georgia. Looking at photos of the school online recently brought up all kinds of memories, especially the pictures of the cafeteria.

It was in that lunchroom that I remember my first anti-drug lecture from police officers. The officer told what was meant to be a terrifying story about a girl who was tripping on LSD yelling out, “Don’t touch me, I’m an orange!” I don’t know, maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but I know we all thought it was hilarious. I’m not sure it scared anyone.

I remember a few food fights, dodgeball on rainy days, and choir concerts. I remember walking home from the school bus with a friend, sharing a packet of candy called “Name Droppers.” These were little tablets like Sweet Tarts, only a bit bigger, with a boy’s name on one side and a girl’s name on the other.

We always looked for our own names to see who our “love” was going to be (oh, the innocence!) I was thrilled when I found my name (Sue, even though I hated that nickname) on one side, backed by the name “Billy.” Swoon, my little 12-to-13-year-old heart. Funny that 40 years later I would marry a Bill, come to think of it.

Mrs. Washington was my first Black teacher. I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She was smart and she was kind. She was also very strong. She put up with a lot from students, but she taught us history and current events that I would always remember.

We had some powerful discussions. That was the year Lt. William Calley was court-martialed for his part in the Mỹ Lai massacre. Protests against the war increased and a bomb went off in the U.S. Capitol men’s room.

Charles Manson and three of the “Family” were found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. Satchel Paige was the first Black ball player voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed that bussing could be instituted to help desegregate the education system.

These discussions, as well as many others, were interesting, appalling, often controversial, and always educational. I remember some of them more than others. Mỹ Lai was particularly horrifying to me.

But what I remember most about the discussions we had in Mrs. Washington’s class was the one in which she shared a story about herself. In a deep discussion about racial tensions and the civil rights movement, she showed us a scar on her temple.

Then, she told us that when she was a young girl, she was with her father running errands in the city where she grew up when they became entangled in racially charged tensions. Someone shot toward them, and she was grazed by one of the bullets. Though she was hurt, she lived to tell the tale to a classroom full of white students in a Georgia suburb in 1971.

I don’t know where Mrs. Washington grew up. I don’t know how old she was, though I don’t think she could have been much over 30. Through the eyes of a 13-year-old, everyone over 20 seems older than they are. I don’t know how her story impacted the other kids, but I will tell you that it had a deep impact on me.

I had not really understood what was happening until that moment. I had not yet encountered more than a small handful of non-white children. It wasn’t until the next year, when we lived in rural Georgia, that I truly experienced and observed racial prejudice.

I wasn’t really prepared for that when the time came, but I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been if I hadn’t met Mrs. Washington first.

To this day I admire Mrs. Washington for her strength and for her ability to teach us some hard truths during an extremely volatile time. She’s one of my heroes.

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This story first appeared in Bouncin and Behavin Blogs on Medium