Here’s another story from Kiley Junior High School.

Mr. Brown was the head of English at Kiley Junior High School when I taught there. You remember that all the principal, Mr. Spring, knew about English teaching, he had learned from Mr. Brown, and this had not exactly made my way of teaching look good.

Mr. Brown was so old school, the kids and I found him a terror. If all Mr. Brown’s students could have been the top academic 5%, his teaching would have been fine, but, as it was, he had ordinary students as well as those who had difficulty learning or even being in school. I pictured those students dying in his classroom. They would have to become zombies in order to survive.

Mr. Brown complained about the students. Unless a student in his class loved grammar and could excel in it, Mr. Brown had no liking for him and no respect. Actually, considerable disrespect.

But one thing you could say about Mr. Brown is that he cared. He gave his all. Under the circumstances, I don’t know how he managed to survive. It was Mr. Brown against the changing world. He didn’t give up. He had to be brave to come to school day in and day out and fight the world. Of course, in another day and age, he would have shone.

Mr. Brown and my brother Sid had been good friends in their younger days, and I had been predisposed to like Mr. Brown, but it didn’t work like that.

I could sense how he disapproved of my teaching, and it had to be that he knew how I felt about his.

Mr. Brown’s room was next to mine, and there was a door between our classrooms.

One afternoon he burst open the door and slapped the head of the sweet innocent seventh-grade boy who was near the door. The boy was Stevie DeLeon, and he was the sweetest boy in the world. Stevie’s father was a soldier in one war or another,  and Stevie and his mother missed him terribly. Stevie’s grandmother knitted sweaters for him, and the kids called him Bubblehead.

Mr. Brown burst through that door and clipped Stevie on the side of his head as if a crime had been committed.  What had Stevie done? Stevie had passed a note under the door.

What should I have done? We were all stunned.  This was like something out of Charles Dickens’ Nickolas Nickleby where innocent children were hit on the head with wooden gruel spoons and worse.

Mr. Brown read the note after he had hit Stevie. The note said: “Please be quiet. You are disturbing us.”

I don’t know what Mr. Brown thought the note would have contained, or what could have been so terrible about kids writing notes and putting them under the door.

Mr. Brown apologized. I will say that much for him.

You can see how it was difficult for me to be in the room next to Mr. Brown.  And how difficult it must have been for Mr. Brown to be in the room next to mine as well.

Years and years later, after I had left Kiley Junior High and was visiting in Springfield, I went to back to say hello to the teachers I had known.  Many had retired or died. None of the students I knew were there.  The murals in my classroom had been painted over. I really didn’t belong there and wondered why I had come.

Of all the teachers, guess who seemed to be the gladdest to see me? It was Mr. Brown.  And of the teachers I saw that day, who was I the happiest to see? It was Mr. Brown. How could this be? And yet it was.