I loved what Barbara did with her associate at work. How amazing of her to have wanted to do something that uplifted the situation, and then she actually did it. She put her ego aside and came from a different perspective. She came from her heart, and she took action. It was just right, and her creative approach made a huge difference.  She did indeed turn the other cheek.

Her situation was with a co-worker, and mine was with a supervisor, and the situations were entirely different anyway. In what I’m going to tell you, I did not respond in a loving way. I was fit to be tied, and that had a happy ending too. I am trying to understand.

I’ve told you before about the principal I had when I was teaching English at Kiley Junior High School in Springfield, Massachusetts. I was doing Philosophy of Language with my class when Mr. Spring came in to observe. I was not using a textbook. How dull a textbook is, and how wonderful philosophy of language is. The kids made notebooks with thoughts and pictures with quotations such as: Man everywhere is a creature who speaks. That beats grammar, and makes grammar more meaningful and worthwhile. Anyway, the kids knew they were getting something great, even when they didn’t fully understand. I strongly believed in not having everything on grade level, and I taught from my heart.

Anyway, Mr. Spring, my principal, did not see value in Philosophy of Language. As a matter of fact, he told me bluntly: “Stop doing that junk.”

Stop doing that junk? My irate response was: “I wonder if there’s any place in the Springfield School System where I can be happy.”

He said: “I’m sure there is.” And he was going to find where.

Now I don’t know how I had the nerve, but, you know, in that situation it proved right. Mr. Spring had been undeniably blunt, and I responded in kind.

Would you believe that Mr. Spring and I came to love and respect each other deeply? This is one of my favorite stories in my whole life.

It seems, surprisingly, that speaking up to Mr. Spring was the right thing to do. He respected me more. I respected myself more.  We had both vented. Something changed. Soon enough I didn’t want to leave any more. Had I held in what I was feeling and not been blunt, I would have been so resentful, and I would somehow have communicated that without a word.

As it was, somehow, my whole feeling changed. From anger, somehow love came in. And in Mr. Spring’s heart as well.

After about two weeks, I went to Mr. Spring and said: “I don’t want to leave any more.”

And he said, “I don’t want you to either, dearie.”

From then on, it was true love.

For instance, whenever a visitor came to visit the school, Mr. Spring told me that he always took them to my room first.

One day, in the teacher’s coffee room, he was sitting with a visitor at the same table with me, and he said to the visitor: “You wouldn’t believe it now but once Gloria and I didn’t see eye to eye.”

Three more things I want to add:

The next time Mr. Spring came in to visit my room, we were using our text book. I didn’t use it heavily, but, luckily, we were doing grammar. I did try.

Mr. Brown was the head of the English Department. He was a die-hard traditional teacher in terms of subject and discipline.  Mr. Brown and I were totally opposite and clearly opposed to each other’s style of teaching. Now, Mr. Spring had originally been a shop teacher. All he knew about English teaching is what he had learned from Mr. Brown. No wonder Mr. Spring had thought I was off the wall.

Mr. Spring never fully understood what my teaching was about. A year or so after Mr. Spring and I came to mutual respect and love, Mr. Mack, the assistant principal, told me that he had gone to Mr. Spring to complain about the appearance of my classroom. My classroom had mobiles of grammar and literature hanging from the ceiling. I put everyone’s papers up, not just the A papers etc., and I had papers overlapping!  From one perspective, the room was a mess. From my perspective, it was the most beautiful classroom in the world.

Well, Mr. Mack was an overly neat person. For example, he liked straight pins on bulletin boards, not thumb tacks which I liked because you can press them in good with your thumb. He would have liked a few perfect papers matted on the bulletin board. The bulletin boards in my classroom were stuffed. And we had work taped to the walls where there weren’t bulletin boards etc.

Anyway, the assistant principal told me he had complained to Mr. Spring about the appearance of my room, and Mr. Spring had told him: “No, leave her alone. There’s something good there.”

I taught at Kiley Junior High for ten years proudly with Mr. Spring as my principal. When Mr. Spring retired, Mr. Mack was not appointed as the new principal. It was a Mr. Kelly from another junior high school, and he disliked me from the first minute, and I didn’t respect or take kindly to him either.  If he had liked me, maybe I could have made it. But as it was, I left.

Now, getting back to my original outright bluntness with Mr. Spring in contrast to Barbara’s generosity and understanding with her co-worker — well, both worked. How do you explain it?