Blood, sweat, tears and a good teacher

Della T. Pearson. I will never forget her name or her face. She was my fifth grade teacher. Back then, you had one teacher for all your subjects. She was tough and strong, with a quick wit and a killer throwing arm. This was 1970 and the world was changing. She was a stout black woman in a nearly all-white elementary school in the suburbs of Atlanta.

The first day of school that year was epic. As we sat in our assigned seats, she told us that she would not be calling us by our first names, but by our last names. So for that year, my name was "Slate." She barely smiled that first few weeks and laid out the rules and what she expected from us. I was a little scared. I also noticed that the worst boys from my grade were in this class. The big, bad, tall ones that made everybody nervous. For some reason, she had them all sitting near the back. Apparently she wasn't afraid of them. There was a huge, long paddle resting on her desk, with holes drilled into it, and a hefty red rubber ball next to it. She also had a staple gun, something I had never seen before. Curious.

We all quickly learned that in Mrs. Pearson's class, you were expected to behave and you would behave or face the consequences. The incorrigible boys tried a few things, a few times, but her unorthodox discipline methods immediately earned their respect. I feel certain that she was always inheriting the lost kids. She was quick with the paddle, leaving the door slightly ajar when she took a wayward child into the hall to spank. She did not have to do it often....we all decided it was better to cooperate. I remember when my friend, Susan, who was a spoiled only-child and had a mouth like a sieve, smarted off at her with her nose in the air and a chunky hand on her hip. Mrs. Pearson was on her like a panther. With our mouths agape, we watched as she marched that sassy gal into the hall and gave her a new badge of humility. The first time one of the bad boys disrespected her from the back of the room, I felt the wind from that red rubber ball as it whizzed past my face straight to the head of the wayward boy. I am laughing now, remembering the shock and awe from the whole classroom. I wonder what today's parents would do with her brazen disregard for all those poor little childrens' psyches? 

What I haven't told yet is the fact that this woman profoundly altered our lives. She, looking down at you with her half-glasses and enough spunk to wither a volcano, had a heart of gold. She truly cared about her students, enough to take them down a rough and rocky road and then to teach them to soar to the heights. She was a math genius. She passed out big, fat, red notebooks (red was her favorite) during our first math class. She taught us Algebra in the fifth grade. She told us to keep our red notebooks and never throw them away. As we toiled away that year, filling those accursed pages with all of her magic tricks, we had a resource that helped us even into high school. 

She taught us poetry, both how to read it and how to write it. Shakespeare. She made us read "To Kill A Mockingbird." In the fifth grade. She took us to the Atlanta Symphony, which changed me forever. We did artwork. Science. Studied the Renaissance. We had to learn "To Dream the Impossible Dream" -- a song from The Man of LaMancha - and sing it for the whole school. She drilled us like she was a military sergeant and then taught us the finer things of life, leading us to the edges of what is beautiful and cultured in this world.

I feared and revered her, but I especially loved her. 

She pulled stuff out of me I didn't know was in there and expected me to rise to greater places. She taught me to take pride in doing things myself, without whining or expecting someone else to help. I was in the fifth grade, ten years old...that time before the hormones start to confuse the world.  There is an innocence that you never quite find again after that. This was the zenith of my life before the onslaught of that hellish place in life: middle school. She built on the foundations I had been blessed to have been raised with, but she didn't presume upon them. She called all of us to dig deep and find a way to press out more than we thought we could. 

It's a place of strength and beauty that I hark back to, that year with Mrs. Pearson. She made me understand that I could do way more than I imagined. That the road to doing something well was usually and often paved with pain and difficulty, but was also worth it. And that to dream the impossible dream was just the beginning...