Kicking the Teach Around

I had a teacher in the fourth grade named Calla Monlux who made me madder than hell.

She was short and dumpy and wore flat-heeled shoes and read poetry to her classes, whether we liked it or not.

She called me Alfie, which I detested, and kept me after school one day so I could prove to her I had written the essays I was turning in.

She couldn’t believe that a kid with a bad attitude and no sense of grammar could write prose, as she said, that caused dogs to howl.

She sat me down in an empty room with a ticking clock after everyone else had gone home and said, “Write,” so I wrote.

Once convinced I hadn’t hired a neighbor to write the essays for me, she kept me after school again several times to torture me with enthusiasm.

She’d read Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” aloud to me in a kind of quavery, high-pitched voice, and when she came to the part that had them “fluttering and dancing in the breeze,” she’d stop and say, “All right, Alfie, now close your eyes and visualize!”

I’d think, “Man, this is really a weird old lady.” I was afraid to close my eyes because you never knew what a crazy person might do to a kid with his eyes closed. But I was also afraid not to, because Monlux had this fiery look in her eyes when she said, “Visualize!”

She’d read some of the lines over and over, and one day something happened. I began to see those damned daffodils in my head, cast in gold, touched by the breezes that whisper down the sweet hillsides of poetry.

She said, “Good for you, Alfie!” and hugged me. She taught me an essential of good writing: imagery. I owe that woman.

Calla Monlux comes to mind because of another teacher who reminds me of her, not in looks, but in tone. This teacher is thinking of quitting the business in despair, and that makes me madder than hell too.

She’s Marjan Swantek, a gentle, soft-spoken person who has a kindergarten class in North Hollywood. Not long ago, she was attacked by a mother for scolding her 5-year-old.

The mother, 6 feet tall and 240 pounds, has pleaded no contest to felony assault and faces a year in jail.

Swantek, who is 64 and not exactly a street fighter, was badly shaken by the incident. She ducks behind doors now whenever she sees a big woman coming down a corridor at Toluca Lake Elementary, because, well, you never know.

“This kind of thing happens in high school or even junior high,” she said to me the other day, “but elementary school? I had expected her to be angry, but I was never prepared for that.”

Swantek is the kind of teacher who doesn’t do a lot of scolding. What she does mostly is try to teach self-esteem to little 5-year-olds who often don’t have any.

She hugs the kids at the start of each class and then has them hug each other, because we all need the feeling that someone cares, and what better place to instill warmth than there, at the beginning?

The world can be dark and cold for a kid, and a teacher’s hug can get him through a life. It’s getting me through mine.

I hate the idea that it might be taken from someone else.

What rankles is not only the tempo of violence that plagues our schools, but that the abuse has come to this particular teacher, Marjan Swantek.

She’s a metaphor for what a guide ought to be, with a caring that extends beyond pay raises and fringe benefits, and centers on the kids themselves.

“I’m an old-fashioned teacher,” Swantek says with a laugh, but she’s more than that. Listen.

The only true love in her life died almost 35 years ago, and she’s never remarried, because no one has ever measured up to the husband she had.

She went into teaching, wrote a book and raised four sons on her own, who were ages 4 months to 6 years when their dad died. They’ve grown to become what she calls lovely men.

The lessons she taught her own sons were the kind that motivated one of them, legally blind, to put himself through college.

The kind of person she is and the kind of teacher she’s become are both rare, and now we face losing her because teaching isn’t worth being smashed and choked for.

“It’s happened to other teachers I’ve known,” she says, “good teachers who couldn’t take the violence. I never thought it would happen to me, but it has.”

Calla Monlux believed in hugs too. She embraced a kid with no dreams and lead him to a dazzling field of daffodils that have shone for him ever since.

Marjan Swantek, by the same qualities, the same hugs, teaches love and self-worth. If violence drives her from teaching, we’re all going to lose.

There just aren’t enough people hugging our kids anymore in an age that cries out for caring.