My Little Town 20110518: Jack Meyers

(9 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, but since he is long gone, he is fair game.  Previously I have written about a wonderful teacher that I had in Hackett, Elwood Brockman.  Tonight I shall write about probably the worst teacher that I ever had, Jack Meyers.

Jack was the son of another teacher at Hackett.  She taught second grade, and was a pretty good teacher.  Jack taught forth, and was just horrible.  I do not know where he went to college, but it must have been a diploma mill.  Jack was not just a poor teacher, he was really, to be blunt, stupid to go along with it.

In those days, a teacher had an entire class and had to teach all of the subjects.  Jack was equally incompetent in all subjects.  In reading class he taught us all to pronounce the “w” in sword, and Mrs. was pronounced “mizress”.  I remember a story that we read in reading class one time about Native Americans and the buffalo.  There was one that they would not kill and eat, since it was an albino, considered sacred by the Native Americans, at least according to the story that we were reading.  According to Jack, the animal was “scared”!  I kid you not.

Another time that I remember well was during history/geography class.  We were learning about Jacques Cartier, the French explorer.  According to Jack, his name was pronounced “Jackews Carter”.  Of course, LaSalle was “LaSally”.

Not to be blowing my own horn, but I knew more science than Jack did when I was in the forth grade, but that was not really that difficult.  Hydrochloric acid was “hydraulic acid”.  I really do not remember much about science with Jack other than that one item, because I tuned him out and just read the book.

In math class, more than once Jack would put up long division problems on the board and “work” them for us.  He did OK until he tried four digit divisors, then he would bog down and finally say, “Well, I’ll take that one to Mr. Brockman and get him to work it and bring the answer back.”  Of course he never did.

Our classroom was in an old building, with ten foot ceilings.  It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It was equipped with gas heaters that were hung from the ceiling joists, about seven and a half feet off of the floor.  The pilot light was prone to go out, and as drafty as the room was, it got cold FAST.  The whole school (grades 1 to 12, no kindergarten) had only one custodian and no communication systems except for the bell.  Since it was forth grade, it must have been around 1966 or 1967.  In any event, the pilot light failed again.

Jack had the routine down pat.  He would drag a table under it (remember this is the forth grade, so the tables were not very tall) and put a chair on the table, then a couple of thick books on the chair.  This got him high enough to be able to reach the pilot light port.  Back in those days we had paper drinking straws, so he would light one of them with a match and put it in the port to relight the pilot light.  Since it was a safety pilot, he had to use the other hand to hold the “light” button down until the pilot heated the thermocouple so that it would stay on, and that took a minute.

This time, evidently the safety feature in the system failed.  For those of you unfamiliar with gas heaters, they are constructed in such a manner that if the pilot light goes out, the thermocouple cools off and this stops all gas feed to the unit, pilot light and burner.  Jack was up on his table, chair, and books, getting ready to light the drinking straw.  He said, “Boy, it sure smells strong up here!”  Instead of getting down and getting the custodian to take a look, he lit the straw, or rather the match (he never got around to the straw) and then the explosion occurred.

The blast threw Jack off of the books, chair, and table and he plunged to the floor.  By that time most of the kids were laughing, obviously.  He was not seriously injured, but by the time that he picked himself off of the floor he no longer had eyebrows, and did not have very much hair!  Needless to say, he went to get the custodian to take a look at the heater then.  As I said, Jack was not only an extremely poor teacher, he was stupid as well.

I could go on about him, but I think that you get the point.  Needless to say, the forth grade was a total waste of time for me, except for the textbooks.  Since I liked to read I was able to learn the material in spite of Jack, not because of him.  Sometimes I look back and wonder about the other kids in his class who were not motivated students to in the first place.  I suspect that they got almost nothing of value that year.

Such are the problems with tiny little school districts, at least at the time in rural Arkansas.  As I recall there were only around 300 students in all 12 grades.  They did not pay much, had extremely limited facilities, and barely got by trying to accomplish their mission.  I had two more years there and my parents made the decision to send me the the Catholic school in Fort Smith.  Saint Anne’s was quite different, but that is a story for another time.

If you have stories about your childhood that you would like to share, please use the comments section to do so.  I like reading about others’ experiences.

UPDATE:  I checked with my dear neighbor and friend, Elmer, who is over 25% Native American, and he agrees that albino buffalo were indeed sacred to the Indians (his preferred term for Native Americans, and I shall use it from now) and that the story that we were reading was factually correct, at least in that respect.

Warmest regards,

Doc