Saints and Sinners: The happily unmarried
Some are happily married. Some are unhappily married. And then there are some who are happily unmarried.
In this latter category are the unwed teachers many of us remember fondly from our school days. In my own case I think particularly of Miss Archer, Miss Spiess, Miss Arter and Miss Marland.
When I paid a visit to Miss Archer 30 years after she had taught me penmanship and the multiplication tables, she didn’t remember me. But I remembered her. Of course a lot of third-graders had passed fingernail inspection since I had been a pupil in her class.
I always think about Grace Archer whenever I hear it argued that unless you have a spouse and children of your own, you can’t know anything about family life or how to handle problems with children.
The truth of the matter is that single teachers are often among the best teachers we have. They often look upon their pupils as their own children and sometimes know more about winning the love of a boy or girl than the child’s own parents.
The mistake the happily married often make is to assume that because they couldn’t conceive of living a full life if THEY were unmarried, that must be so of everybody else.
In any case, based on personal experience and very unscientific research, I am going so far as to say we probably couldn’t get along without our unmarried teachers for several reasons:
1. They have a knack for bringing out the best in their pupils.
A favorite story of mine I like to tell (and one I may have told you before) is about the time I wrote an essay for English Literature class in high school in which I defended my own proposition that if any poet deserved to be immortalized it was Edgar Guest, not Miss Spiess’ choice, William Shakespeare.
My main line of argument was that at least you could understand Edgar Guest. I mentioned that I wanted to be a sports writer and what good would Shakespeare be to someone covering the Cleveland Indians or Ohio State’s baseball team? But she gave me a B on my essay and said nothing more.
Then one day she came into class with a clipping from the sports pages. One of the Cleveland Indians’ pitchers was having trouble keeping his weight down in spring training. The sports writer described the player’s predicament by quoting a line from “Hamlet” —”O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.”
I can still see the gleam in Miss Spiess’ eye as she laid that clipping on my desk. I was won over. I never read Guest again. (But I still like that line of his: “… he tackled the thing / that couldn’t be done, and he did it.”)
2. Our unmarried teachers are fearless with the class troublemakers. They brook no nonsense. Consequently, the atmosphere in their classrooms is pleasantly conducive to learning.
I recall Miss Arter once pulling Henry, the sixth-grade class’s bad boy, up by the hair on his head when he talked back to her. Wasn’t she afraid Henry would go home and tell his father what Miss Arter had done? He wouldn’t have dared!
3. Unmarried teachers are a forgiving sort.
Miss Marland once gave our second-grade class a 100-word spelling test. One of the words was “these” which I spelled “theese” — after all, I reasoned, “cheese” is spelled with two e’s.
When we got our graded papers back, there was a “100” at the top of mine. Had I spelled “these” right after all? No, I had spelled it wrong but Miss Marland had not caught my error. However, I wanted that “100” so much that I didn’t tell her.
More than 30 years later, I was asked to address a group of my old teachers. Miss Marland was there! Here was my chance to make a confession, which I did.
“Oh, George, that’s all right,” said Miss Marland, “the grades are already in.”
Now, how about unmarried clergy? Are they as effective in their roles as married ministers? We’ll take that question up on another day when I tell you about four bachelor ministers I knew.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)