Читать книгу Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults) - Michael N Marcus - Страница 18

In the early 1960s, Patrick J. Leone taught health and science at the Dr. Susan S. Sheridan Junior High School in New Haven, Connecticut.

Leone preferred that his name be pronounced as a two-syllable anglicized “Lee-On,” and he was obviously shaken if anyone acknowledged his Italian ancestry and pronounced the final vowel.

This seemed strange, because New Haven was a very Italian city and there were many Italian-American teachers and students in the schools. Another Italian-American teacher would deliberately piss him off by calling him “Pasquale” or “Patsy Lay-o-nay.”

Leone would squirm and blush.

Unfortunately, Leone had lower standards for his own verbalizations than for others, pronouncing health as “helt” and science as “sines.”

His speech defect was complemented by a persistent memory problem. Every time my class entered his room—three times a week for ten months—he’d look at us plaintively and ask, “Division Eight, helt or sines?”

He didn’t know which subject he was supposed to teach us; and even when we confirmed that we were in his classroom to learn about helt, he sometimes tried to teach us sines.

Leone sure knew a lot about sines. He once told a class that “Det (death) kills instantly.”

Unlike our friends who had other teachers for helt, or health, we had no textbooks. Leone blamed the problem on the “Board of Ett,” and for months he assured us that the texts would be arriving soon.

Leone gave no lectures. There were no discussions and few quizzes. Most of our class time consisted of laboriously copying into our notebooks the words that he had laboriously written onto the blackboard.

Sometimes one of us would notice an error on the board, such as a “to” that should have been a “too.” Usually Leone would blame “juvenile delinquents” who’d sneak into his room during lunch period and change his words. Other times he’d try to justify his writing and deliver a long dissertation on grammar with parts of speech we never heard of in our English classes (“subdulated abominative”). A few times he blamed defective chalk that twisted in his hand.

Leone was a frustrated performer/producer/director, and parents’ visiting day was SHOWTIME.

Parents would be welcomed by the class singing the Brusha Brusha Brusha song from the Ipana toothpaste commercial (starring Bucky Beaver), and then Leone sailed an embalmed bat around the room like a balsawood model airplane. For his grand finale, he squirted the children with water from a hypodermic syringe.

I was not the only Michael in our seventh-grade health class. The other Michael, whose last name Leone always mispronounced, got sick early in the school year and was out for several months. Leone confused the two Michaels, and frequently reported me for skipping class.

Throughout the year, there was a mysterious stack of cardboard boxes gathering dust in a corner of the classroom.

In June, with summer approaching, the kids were feeling frisky, and one of them dared to sneak into the unoccupied classroom during lunch period. He cut open the cartons and found our missing textbooks, which had been in the room since September and had not been delayed by the inefficient bureaucrats downtown.

The burglar noticed that one carton had been opened previously. And after flipping through some pages of one of the texts, the familiar words soon made it obvious that Leone had removed one of our books for personal use.

Each week, he secretly copied a chapter onto the blackboard, and then we’d spend three days copying those same words from the blackboard into our notebooks.

The kids in our class had assumed that Leone, and not some wise medical authority hired by Houghton Mifflin or Prentice Hall, was the author of those words we were ordered to copy each day, while Leone sat and stared out the window and hummed for 45 minutes.

We were never allowed to see “our” books because Patsy Leone found it much easier to copy and have us copy, than to learn and to teach.

He was not a helty man.