In 1960, freshman civics students at McPherson High had to write a “what I want to be when I grow up” paper. Easy. I liked history. I was girl. I didn’t want to type insurance policies the rest of my life. High school teaching was an accepted female career. Perfect. By golly, I’d be a high school history teacher. So in college I took every history class offered and the required education courses. My senior year, I student-taught junior high and high school kids in a tiny Mennonite town 15 miles down the road. So easy, it was like play-pretending teacher in our basement when I was ten.
By 1970, I had two glorious summers of seasonal rangering at Gettysburg under my belt. My Oregon graduate school major professor made a strong pitch for working toward a PhD. But ten years of assumptions lingered. I just wanted my first assignment to be close to Gettysburg and the friends I’d made there.
Francis Scott Key High School was situated in the heart of rolling rural Maryland, thirty minutes from the battlefield. Well away from Baltimore and Washington D. C. Surely the land of solid, industrious farm families raising respectful children just like the Mennonite students I’d met in Kansas. In 1970-71, the school had decided to make US History a sophomore rather than a junior course, so needed double the teachers. Just down Middlesburg Road, Olive and Roger Roop, an older Church of the Brethren couple had transformed their daughters’ bedrooms into a furnished apartment. To the great relief of my parents, the pastor at the local Brethren church made the connection and promised to keep an eye out for me.
In the few weeks I spent in Kansas between Eugene, Oregon, and Union Bridge, Maryland, my dad helped me buy a used turquoise Dodge Dart and my mother took on the question of a teaching wardrobe. Up until then, she had sewn all my clothes. But now, perhaps remembering her own fashionable career days, she drove us to Pegues Department Store in Hutchinson, installed me in a dressing room, and joined a sales lady to bring me several seasons’ worth of professional outfits. A ritual far, far outside the family norm.
I also took a little time to start organizing my teaching materials and lessons. For instance, carefully transferring clever cartoons about history’s importance onto overhead projector transparencies. And started writing—longhand—a bunch of day’s objectives and content and methods. Once I got to Maryland and could get into my room, I gave great attention to eye-catching bulletin boards and unusual desktop accoutrements.
The first day of school followed Labor Day, which turned out to be sinister and stormy. Heat lightning flickered throughout that sleepless night. My memories sweetly and suddenly blur after that. I have shadows of realizing quickly that all my carefully prepared lessons on the value of history—illustrated with those cartoons—crashed and burned. Every hour, the room fell silent and twitchy. I remember buying the world’s tiniest black and white TV to keep abreast of current events, because those seemed to have a bit more classroom traction. I remember alternately great joy at finding relevant “YOU ARE THERE” films with Walter Cronkite and great terror at being left to thread the projector myself, crouching next to a smirking, worldly-wise junior girl who had sussed out my fear the very first day of school.
In fact, the bedrock issue of my teaching year was fear. Most days, I got to school early with a somewhat renewed “can do” spirit. And managed to get through the first five classes before lunch. Long on lecturing and all too awkward and unsuccessful in creating any discussion. During my 6th period teacher prep hour, the break room offered little relief—always atwitter with gossip about wicked student behavior. In fact, I have a sharp memory of being regaled with tales of the year that students climbed lengthwise into the low, sliding door bookshelves at the back of my classroom to set books on fire. I would limp through 7th period and then seek sympathy from Mrs. Price, a longtime history teacher and a colleague who understood first year traumas.
Every day after school, I stopped by Sarah and Nevin Dutrow’s house, just up the road from my apartment for a reassuring cup of tea. The Dutrows were also Brethren and had children my age. I’d go on home and eat exactly one Reese’s peanut butter cup and grade papers until time for the news. After which I‘d put some supper together and begin crafting the following day’s lesson plan on the expansive tabletop Roger had built into the little kitchen. I purely loved that part of the day. Even then I understood the irony: that I reveled in the links and theories and themes and what if’s of history and had no talent, or more accurately, no emotional maturity to manage a classroom.
I was afraid of the students. At the time, given my sheltered growing up and relative docility, the kids seemed to be leagues beyond me in sophistication. And forever on the cusp of finding and exploiting the cracks in my confidence and skill. They were not, in fact, really “rural” students. Many of their parents worked shifts in a local shoe factory or commuted to Baltimore. They were indeed more jaded than the Inman, Kansas, farm kids. Still, I look at the yearbook now and see ordinary teenagers undoubtedly as discomfited and uneasy in life as I was. At the time, I couldn’t relax into that empathy.
I finished that year with lots of calls home; a good many dinners shared with Olive and Roger; $7,000 dollars earned; and frequent weekend trips to Gettysburg and to Mud College Road where Barb and Roger Steele, art and biology teachers from the school, welcomed me. But when it came time to sign the next year’s contract, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I’d pinned down another summer ranger job on the battlefield. And learned that there might—just might—be a 36 hour a week position at the Park starting in the fall. I took the risk.©
