Patchwork Pillows
Retrieved from www.shelterness.com
In the 4th grade, I learned how to sew a patchwork pillow. We did it in class. Parents were livid. They didn’t think we were ‘learning’. Our teacher, Mrs. Henderson, had long dark hair that was thick and shiny, the kind that looked like she brushed it at least 100 strokes before bed every night. She wore bright clothes and a headband that held back her hair, not like a hippie but more like a cover girl who had just washed her face. And she taught us stuff. How to make a pillow is what I remember most.
She also read Old Yeller aloud--southern accents and all--every day at 2:00 p.m. about thirty minutes before the final bell. Back then there was no PETA to censor a book about the killing of a dog—censoring wasn’t anything people even talked much about—especially in a rural school that people only stumble upon if they make a wrong turn when they’re leaving Ardmore and are trying to find their way back home. I’m grateful that PETA stayed out of it, too. Because if they’d been around, I might not have met Old Yeller and that would have been a travesty. I loved the Coates family. I loved their dog. And I loved the fact that no worksheets accompanied the reading. We just listened to our teacher read a story about a stray yellow dog and we got to make of it what we would.
Retrieved from www.list23.com
It was there in Mrs. Henderson’s classroom, that I first learned about foreshadowing, even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Our teacher would peer over the top of the golden hardback book, pausing strategically for effect when she came to the parts that hinted of the dog’s unfortunate ultimate demise. When she came to the detailed account of Old Yeller’s violent tussle with the wild- eyed wolf, we all knew something important was coming. She taught us to look for it with her giant, brown eyes.
Mrs. Henderson read pretty much without distraction. (Which I found remarkable given the audience). She read with rhythm and feeling. She read with dialect. She read with style. And when she got to the part about necessity—the part where Travis, the oldest brother, did what he had to do, her throat tightened and she couldn’t read on. So, she asked me to come up and do what she couldn’t. I got to read the last three pages of Old Yeller to the room.
Mrs. Henderson rose from her chair, handed me the book, and slid quickly to the back of the 4th graders sitting cross legged on the floor. She grabbed a tissue and let me be Travis doing grown up work, protecting mama and Arliss while Mr. Coates was away from the farm. I didn’t have to shoot Old Yeller, but I got to slip on responsibility and wear it in front of my friends.
Don’t tell me learning didn’t happen inside Mrs. Henderson’s room. We learned because she let us. She threw real life out into the middle of the floor and then got out of the way.
What my 4th grade teacher did better than any teacher I ever had, however, was put everything in a bowl and stir it around with a stick—some sewing, some cooking, some reading, a little math. We grew plants in plastic cups that we lined neatly along the windowsill. We wrote letters to famous people and picked up trash from the playground on sunny spring days. In Mrs. Henderson’s classroom, the curriculum was part of the patchwork pillow, a piece but not the whole of what she set out to teach us every day. She recognized the importance of basics, for sure, but she wanted us to be more than regurgitating robots. She wanted us to learn how to do things. How to think, how to live.
A bunch of stuff that seems to be off limits these days.
It didn’t always work out perfectly, though, this unconventional approach to education. Sometimes the stirring got a little messy and spilled over the edge. There was a lot going on inside her 4th grade room.
I remember a little semi-stink that arose one time about how Mrs. Henderson spelled ‘potato’ on a sign. Apparently, she added the ‘e’, like you do when it goes plural. It was on a random easel in the corner of her room, unexpectedly visible to visitors on the night of open house. Some parents’ britches popped. I think my folks just rolled their eyes. But in our teacher’s defense, I could see where the confusion could have come from. Our language has some interesting spelling laws. Why wouldn’t potato end with an ‘e’? Why shouldn’t you just add an ‘s’ to make it plural? Those ‘e’s’ sometimes belong and sometimes they don’t. It can get a little tough to keep up with, especially in a sea of patchwork sewing with a mini nursery on the shelf. Truth be known, I think a lot of people were unsure themselves about how to spell it. I remember a lot of ciphering by the parents in the hall.
It didn’t faze those of us in Mrs. Henderson’s class though. The next day she just drew a line through the ‘e’ and kept on going. Kind of like she told us to do when we messed up. Funny thing is, I never forgot how to spell potato. Or tomato, for that matter. And, as it turned out, the ‘e’ was a fairly easy thing for an educated person to be confused about. Dan Quayle did it on national television in 1992.
Perfect teachers were not what a bunch of 9-year-olds needed. What we needed was information and instruction, space for exploration, guidance about how to do practical things, and examples of how to handle missteps. We needed the balance of it all—the pillows and the grammar and the imperfection.
I hated it when 4th grade had to come to an end.
I remember feeling like such a grown-up inside that chamber piped with independent air, the one with the tag on the door that read, “Mrs. Henderson’s Room.” Even though it may have seemed somewhat unconventional to outsiders at the time, inside her walls, school made perfect sense. The dots of the what and the why were connected by a line.
That patchwork pillow I made in her class stayed with me for years. Decades even. Not because it was particularly pretty, but because it stood for something I didn’t want to throw away. It smelled and looked and felt like learning. The kind that lasts forever no matter what you do.
P.S. Old Yeller