The Latin Teacher

       We passed by the building, which we have done many times in the past few years.  This time, something stimulated a memory of my time student teaching in that building.

     Perhaps it started when the Goodwife asked about how I knew my way through what to her is an unfamiliar maze of roads and landmarks.  I replied that I had been down that road many a time.  Why?

     Because I did my student teaching there.  Which reminded me that I didn’t do a lot of driving in that experience.  Three of the teachers that taught there lived in Greeley.  Two of them invited me to join their carpool.  Which I did.

      After I drove once or twice, they generously offered to let me off the hook when it came my turn to drive.  After all, they said, they were splitting the duties between the two of them, so it would be no extra cost to have me ride along.  Besides, they said, I was a poverty-stricken  student, and they would be helping me out.

       Which was true.  It might have had something to do with them not wanting to ride in, or be seen in, a doggy old black-and-white ’55 Chevy, too.

      One lady’s husband was a preacher.  I’m not sure why they lived in Greeley.  The other lady’s husband was a student at Colorado State College.  The typical story, wife finding a job within commuting distance to keep the family afloat while hubby works on a degree. 

     The third Greeley resident was a guy who only rode with us once or twice during my nine weeks there.  I don’t remember what he taught, but his duties required  him to  be there early or to stay late, which didn’t work out in a carpooling arrangement.

       As I recalled those days, memories of other faculty members sprang to life.  Two of those faculty folks were a married couple, an old couple.  They were probably in their sixties, ancient in my mind at that time.

      They had to be near the end of their careers, but they were also somewhat victims of the change of retirement systems.  PERA was fairly new and perhaps they didn’t have enough time to qualify for retirement yet.  I don’t really know, but I wonder why they continued to teach if they could have retired.

      I don’t remember what the old gentleman taught.  He was quiet, not terribly outgoing, and seemed content to follow his wife and let her do the interacting with others.  I only saw them in the morning when we all arrived and left coats etc. in the teachers’ lounge.

      One morning early in my tenure there, the old couple came into the lounge and removed their wraps.  The old lady, who was the Latin teacher, proceeded to open her purse and remove a carefully-folded 8 ½ X 11 blue-inked ditto master.

      She moved to the “copy machine”, which in those days was the “spirit duplicator”.  The mere mention of the machine brings to mind the alcohol scented blue-inked pages teachers used to distribute copies to students in those olden days.  (It would be more than a decade before “Xerox machines” would replace the Gestetner ditto duplicator.)

       “What was up with that?” I wondered, as she unfolded the ditto master and clamped it into the drum of the duplicator.  It would take a while, but eventually I got it figured out.  It was in a way a game played by the Latin teacher and her students.

       It seems that the classical teacher would assign her students something to learn every day at the end of the class period, I know not what, but it couldn’t have been a huge assignment.  An assigned spy, some kid who arrived early every day and was there when the teachers arrived, would stand by the door where the old couple entered the building.  He would observe whether she had a ditto master in hand.  If she did, there would be a quiz at the beginning of the class hour.

     The spy would spread the word and the students would hurriedly do their homework  before reporting to class—or make their cheat sheets, perhaps.  Somehow, the old lady caught on to the students’ system.  Thus it was, ditto sheets were borne not in hand, but smuggled into the building in her purse.

      As I reflected on that memory, it occurred to me that teachers in my day were more concerned with students learning than playing gotcha.  Perhaps the well-intentioned Latin teacher should have reacted by carrying a duplicate master in with her every morning, whether it had anything typed on it or not.

     But that is second-guessing.  I, too, found myself having to play gotcha in my day, when students tried to outsmart the system.  I am thinking of one girl who charged $10 for a book report.  She insisted that her customers copy her prose in their own hand.  She sold only one copy so I never got the identical report from two or more students.

       When I switched to multiple choice tests to relace the old book report, I found some enterprising student managed to copy the answers and hand them off to a classmate who happened to be in another section of the same class.  Making cheat sheets for vocabulary tests never went out of vogue.

      In the end, my hat is off to you, old Latin teacher.  I appreciate your effort to defeat human nature!