The Best of Pickering

From My Side of the Desk

From My Side of the Desk not many children studied latin at the Male and Female Select School in Smith County. To get enough students for the ‹rst-year class Quintus Tyler visited Sunday schools around Carthage. Some of Jesus’ best friends, Quintus told Sunday scholars, knew Latin well. In hopes of arousing interest Quintus described Pompeii on the ‹rst day of class and passed around an old National Geographic. Over the years the Geographic became tattered. One September Carolynne Foshee sneezed on the photograph of the House of the Silver Wedding at Pompeii while somebody stuck chewing gum on Hercules and Telephus, a wall painting from Herculaneum. The gum covered Hercules’ behind. A stringy bit resembling a ‹shing line trailed down across the lion beside Hercules’ right foot, then ran out to the end of the page before curving around and upward, back through the picture, ending in a small plop over Telephus ’s left eye. Although Quintus suspected Laney Scruggs, he never discovered who stuck the gum on Hercules. What he was certain about, however, was that the gum was Spearmint—Wrigley’s, he told Turlow Gutheridge. “I pushed it about with a protractor and sniffed before it hardened,” he explained. Eventually the Geographic got so dirty that Quintus retired it. Although he searched the attics of Carthage, Quintus was unable to ‹nd another copy. A man of settled habits and years, Quintus enjoyed describing Pompeii, and so instead of changing the class, he decided to replace the Geographic with a volcano, one of his own creation. He bought a box of colored chalk and arriving early the ‹rst day of school covered the blackboard behind his desk with an extraordinary volcano. Big hunks of orange stone and a gray cloud of ash exploded toward the picture of George Washington hanging on the wall. Red lava gushed through a green countryside. Just ahead of the lava stick people ›ed along a road: two men in a pink chariot and a woman in a long blue bathrobe the end of which had caught ‹re. On the shoulder of the road lay an abandoned crib, two little paw-like hands tossing a spotted white 154
ball into the air. Quintus was proud of the drawing, and after the ‹rst bell when students ‹led into the class he stepped from behind his desk, striding over to the corner of the room near the stand holding the Tennessee state ›ag. Pointing to the picture with a yardstick, he asked, “What do you think this is?” When the children looked puzzled and did not answer, he persisted. “You don’t know?” he said. “Look at this red ›ame. What does it remind you of?” For a moment the silence continued , the children studying carvings on their desks and the curious patterns dirt made under their ‹ngernails. Suddenly awareness erupted. “Mr. Tyler, Mr. Tyler,” Billie Dinwidder shouted, waving his hand and speaking before Quintus recognized him, “it looks like Hell.” Billie and Quintus sat on opposite sides of the desk, and their views were not the same. The perspective from outside the classroom differs even more. Often people interview me about things educational. Although the questions asked are usually similar, they focus on matters I rarely think about. “What teachers in›uenced you?” reporters invariably ask. Because people want to believe education is a high endeavor shaping both moral and ‹nancial success and because reporters expect a platitudinous response, I mention one or two teachers. The truth is that home, heredity, and luck, not the classroom, have determined the course of my life. The question which ought to be asked is what teachers did I in›uence. Was fourth grade ever the same for Miss Bonny after I left, and how did I change Mrs. Harris’s life in the eighth grade? Reporters interested in universities presuppose con›icts between teaching and research when the truth is that research invigorates my teaching. Between classes I roam wood and ‹eld collecting insects and wild›owers. One day early this past October I ‹lled the pockets of my sport coat with animal droppings. “Tiffany,” I said walking into a creative writing course and handing a furry hunk of raccoon scat to the most carefully perfumed student in class, “look at this.” “John,” I said, turning to a skinny boy wearing a T-shirt with the Grateful Dead on the front, “smell this. Take a bite if you want. It tastes sweeter and is better for you...