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Mrs. McTurk seemed to like me, but I believe it was because her mind was slipping and she thought I was my brother (it was not uncommon for her to refer to me as “Peter”).  She even gave me the weekly responsibility of wheeling the school’s decrepit black and white TV into the classroom and plugging it in every Friday to watch a half-hour CBC educational program called Read-a-long.  The show was hosted by a talking boot puppet and taught the pleasures of reading and storytelling.  I don’t know which pot-smoking hippie at the CBC came up with the idea of talking footwear or how it related to literacy, but for me it was the highlight of the school week.

An old-school Canadian Anglophone, Mrs. McTurk had been teaching for so long that she would probably have had to dangle a student out a window in order to get fired.  She made us sing ‘O Canada’ and salute the flag each day, something not done by any other Barclay teacher.  She also made us pray in class first thing each morning, despite the fact that not all the students in multi-ethnic Barclay School were Christian, and the PSBGM had banned school prayers years earlier.  And it wasn’t a moment of silent prayer either; no, she wrote it on the blackboard the first day of class and had us commit it to memory. I don’t remember how it went, but I recall that it awkwardly rhymed. 

I went along with it because it was the first grade and I didn’t know better.  My parents told me to listen to my teacher.  Even if I did tell on her, my moderately religious mother would not have complained because, as I found out later, her former one-room school in Greece also had prayers every morning, and truth be known she was not sophisticated enough to understand the concept civil liberties and freedom of choice.  My father, on the other hand, was a politically active atheist, and I realize now he would have gone totally ape-shit if he found out.  I don’t know if any of the non-Christian kids told their parents about the prayers.  The student body at Barclay was made up almost exclusively with the children of immigrants, who often fled political oppression in third-world dictatorships and were just grateful to be in Canada with no death squads hunting them, so they probably thought it prudent to avoid making waves.

Although she made the Hindu and Sikh students prey to Jesus, to be fair to her she was not a racist, and treated all students equally, whether good or bad.  But as I said earlier, she was old-school, and that included the way she disciplined children.  Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. McTurk never struck any of the students, not like my first grade Saturday morning Greek School teacher (whose name I am unable to recall, or maybe I’m just blocking it out due to trauma) who used to mercilessly beat her students with a ruler if they misbehaved, had messy handwriting, or got an answer wrong. And it was no wimpy thirty centimetre ruler either; no, that psycho bitch wielded a wooden yardstick.  The first time she used it on me, (the horrible, unforgivable offence I had perpetrated:  I forgot one of my textbooks at home!) I immediately ratted her out to my parents.  They took that maniac’s side and said I probably deserved it, (as a child I had numerous behaviour problems and was quite the handful to my parents and teachers alike, so they sympathized with her), and again that sort of thing was common in Greece, but that’s not the point!  She really swung that yardstick hard! It wasn’t corporal punishment; it was more like sergeant punishment.  And not a regular three-stripe sergeant either;  more like a master sergeant or sergeant major, (whichever has the three chevron stripes along with the three lower stripes), but I digress.

Humiliation was Mrs. McTurk’s preferred a means of correcting students who made mistakes or whose behaviour deviated slightly.  I recall vividly one occasion when we were doing art and our assignment was a self-portrait.  We were of course only six or seven year olds, so I don’t know why she had such high expectations, (excuse us for not being a bunch of Norman Rockwells).  As she patrolled the room carefully monitoring our progress, she snatched an unfortunate student’s work and held it up before the whole class exclaiming:  “Oh, Look!  George has a purple face!  I didn’t know your face was purple!  It doesn’t look purple to me!”

George was a thin, runty Greek kid who kind of resembled Alfred E. Newman.  He was in my kindergarten class a year earlier and was often picked on by bullies. I hardly knew him and never game him any grief myself; but I also never stopped anyone from bothering him, either. His face was in fact not purple, but rather pale.  I don’t know why he coloured the face on his self-portrait purple, but there it was for all to see.

When Mrs. McTurk said that line, I burst into uncontrollable and unstoppable laughter.  I wasn’t really George I was laughing at, but rather the way she delivered the line. Most of the other students laughed initially, and then moved on.  I of course had a case of the giggles for the remainder of the day, annoying the rest of the class, especially George.

My comeuppance came weeks later during an in-class reading competition. Mrs. McTurk divided the class into two teams of equal in size.  The teams formed twin lines down the centre of the classroom.  She had prepared dozens of flashcards with simple words like “dog” or “house”.  Two students (one from each team) would approach her and she would flash the word. The first child to say the word correctly received a point for their team.  If you got a word wrong, you were eliminated from the game and had to stand at the back of the class.

I fancied myself rather bright and intelligent at the time (I know better now) and thought that would be my chance to shine and win the game for my team, proving to Mrs. McTurk and the rest of my class just how superior I was to the rest of those dimwitted morons.  I even bragged openly about how I planned to dominate the match.   

So the game began, and I was near the front of the line.  Finally it was my turn, and I knew I would get it because I was up against ol’ purple face himself.  Certainly I was smarter than him.  I was brimming with over-confidence.  Mrs. McTurk held up a flash card which read “open” and I, for some reason, exclaimed “people!”, (an honest mistake given how excited I was). I’ll never forget the surprised, disappointed, almost angry look on her face. 

“No Andreas that’s wrong.  What is the word, George?”

“Open,” he announced confidently, with an impish grin that said: “My turn to laugh at you motherfucker!”

I was the first person eliminated from the match; soon followed by some of my less talented classmates, eventually including George. To his credit he at least lasted longer than I did.  So there I stood in the back with all the “dumb kids”.  When the competition was over, Mrs. McTurk cruelly ridiculed us in front of the rest of the class, telling us to turn and face the window and hang our heads in shame.  On top of everything else my team lost, with me, the self-proclaimed superstar, tripping at the starting gate and falling flat on my face.

“I’m ashamed of you all…I don’t want to see your faces!” she said.

With all her faults, I must confess it was Mrs. McTurk who taught me how to read and write, and I’ll never forget that, or confuse “open” and “people” again.

Before I was finished with elementary school Mrs. McTurk retired and I never saw or heard from her again.  My Mom still lives just up the street form Barclay.  I pass the old place every time I go to visit her.  It’s now a French-language educational institution and part of a different school board.  The students are still children of immigrants, mostly from Asia, the Caribbean or Africa.  They replaced the windows, but otherwise it still looks pretty much the same.  I often reflect on how education has changed; how the teachers are no longer cruel, and what that will mean for the next generation. 

Will another student, thirty-five years from now, be writing a story about their teacher?  And what would they have to say?