My fifth-grade teacher was Mrs. Sharp. She left teaching shortly after my fifth-grade year to pursue a career in real estate. I like to work with the assumption she was encouraged to find a new path. At least, in the back of my mind, I hope so.
However short her time in the classroom was, it was certainly memorable.
At the time, my mother taught in the school I went to, so she knew Mrs. Sharp personally. The education world in our district was small and interconnected – our neighbors were also educators. Their mother was a middle school teacher in the district, and the father was a principal at another school in the district. So, discussions around school and the district were commonplace. Not so much from my parents, but certainly from my neighbors.
I overheard juicy tidbits of who was having an affair with whom, and who photocopied their backside on a district copier. I knew of the principal who only hired attractive blonde teachers and was jokingly described as always interviewing his next wife. (He was married at least five times, each of which was a teacher he hired.)
Each little disclosure came with strict warnings of confidentiality.
Those district conversations also included a yearly tradition of our neighbor, Mr. Crow, announcing who he had hand-picked as his children’s teachers. He delivered it like he had gone to a farmers’ market and got first pick at a tray of produce. And then he would lean into my mother and father and ask, “Who did you pick?” Their answer was a variation of the same answer each year. “Oh, we will leave that to the school.” Mr. Crow would put on his exaggerated show of horrendous disbelief that they would not take control of their children’s education and flail his arms in overdramatized movements. The little show always ended with some monologue about how they lacked assertiveness. (Back in the 70s, Assertive Discipline was a huge thing… and the word “Assertive” was a buzzword. Mr. Crow was always walking around trying to prove his depth of “assertive abilities.”)
As a policy, my parents did not practice the art of “choosing” who my or my brother’s teachers would be. There were inherent issues that came in tow with that behavior, played out in the social dynamics of teachers in that school. Mother taught there, and my father, for a time, was the PTA president. However, our neighbors had no hesitation picking their children’s teacher each year. They announced it as a statement of elitist honor.
I asked mom and dad about this later in life, and mom confided in me she hesitated to pick classrooms for my brother and me, as that sent a message, she valued one of her colleagues over the others. Mother was a profound advocate for teachers. She was the NEA rep for the school and always tried to find the humanity in the teacher who was expected to be perfect. Teachers are often held to excellence while simultaneously being human. The saying “humans make mistakes, we are all human” …does not apply to teachers. The saying for teachers is, Humans make mistakes; teachers are not allowed to make mistakes, so go forward and be excellent and don’t make any mistakes. That’s what teachers are expected to do.
Now, before we venture further into this memory, in spite of what I am about to retell, I did have meaningful experiences and did learn and grow during my fifth-grade year. Although I’m not sure all my classmates did. Fifth grade with Mrs. Sharp was a lesson in many things, most of which could be categorized as “How not to treat children.”
I did gain an understanding of the world and how adults moved among each other. I knew from a young age I wanted to be a teacher and was taking notice of how teachers taught. I heard conversations between my mother and her sister, my aunt, who also taught, and had an inside understanding of what a teacher’s life was like.
Mother told me later, when she saw which room I had been assigned to for fifth grade, while not exactly pleased, she felt confident I would be ok with Mrs. Sharp because I was a strong student and she knew Mrs. Sharp liked me. Or at least she wanted my mother to like her, so… she favored me. I will admit Mrs. Sharp never did anything directly to me.
However, my mother had no idea of the subtle nuances of classroom experience that went on in that fifth-grade classroom until I had her and would come home to retell the accounts of the day. I often wonder if my having Mrs. Sharp was actually part of what might have illuminated some of her otherwise unknown behaviors. While the school community knew she was hard-nosed, they certainly did not know the depth of how she played out her personality in the classroom. And I find the timing of her leaving within the next year more than a coincidence.
As my mother taught in the school, Mrs. Sharp demonstrated profound kindness and gave me a lot of attention, so much so that I noticed. I was in the group of students who Mrs. Sharp let get a drink of water from the fountain for as long as we liked, while she counted to five for others; go to the bathroom whenever we asked, while others had to wait for the bathroom break. We could tell jokes, and in all things feel hand-picked to be “lucky.”
However, there were others in the class who had a totally different experience. As the memories I have of fifth grade cycle around and around in my head, I remember one moment that serves as the pinnacle.
We were in a small group in the back of the room. We finished early with our SSR (sustained silent reading- which is reading the next level reader, and taking a quiz on how much you retained). I was in the group that always finished first, and then needed to have something to do, so we did not get out of hand. So, here we were, the four of us, two Scotts, one Kim, and me. Yes, there were two Scotts in my class. And we were allowed to draw and use the stencils while we waited for our classmates. Mrs. Sharp would openly refer to them as the “Slow” readers. There’s your first hint at her personality in the classroom.
Scott P. was super funny and could get us going so easily. He was the class clown – brilliant but irrepressible, the kind of kid whose quick wit and perfectly timed jokes could crack up an entire room. Mrs. Sharp despised him for it. Even though he was in the ‘smart’ group, his inability to maintain her sacred silence made him a frequent target. She seemed to take his humor as a personal affront, as if each laugh he generated was an act of rebellion against her authority.
He had slipped one of the stencils we were using to trace into his mouth, and it was just that much too wide that it stretched his mouth into this weird smile “(a little like the Joker in Batman).” Now, a ten-year-old can’t look at that and not laugh. The other Scott and I looked up at him and instantly laughed. It was not outrageous, but enough to disrupt the silent classroom. Mrs. Sharp insisted on a SILENT room, and she meant it. To this day, I feel horrible for laughing. It took her only a moment to be standing among our desks arranged in our tight little group. Scott P. still had the stencil in his mouth when he realized she was standing behind him. It was our eyes that had moved from him to up and over his shoulder that gave him that clue.
We stopped laughing instantly.
Mrs. Sharp looked at Scott P. and said the most profoundly ugly statement. I can’t bring myself to say it in full, but I’ll describe it enough so that you get the gist.
“So, Scott, you want to stretch your lips out to look like …” and then came words so ugly, so steeped in hatred, that forty years later I still can’t bring myself to repeat them. She used the worst racial slurs, compared his stretched lips to racist stereotypes, and invoked the entire African continent as an insult.
I felt immediately sick. I thought I would throw up. I remember taking my eyes off Mrs. Sharp to look at my friend Betty, sitting across the room. Betty, my best friend sitting there in her beautiful black skin. Her eyes rose from her work to meet mine. We stared at each other, held hostage by the moment. Then, as my eyes moved back, I saw the tears streaming down Scott’s face. She said more about how stupid he was to be putting something so dirty in his mouth, and how it would probably change how he looked. Those words play in the background as I watch my friend melt in humiliation right in front of me.
I can remember how we were seated. He was wearing a white and red striped shirt, facing the windows, with the sunlight streaming across his blond hair, and his blue eyes shone from his face. I was to his right, sideways to the windows. Kim was to my right with her back to the windows, and then the other Scott was directly across from me. Our little quad of desks gathered up into a tight square. Our little foursome was often together at the back of the room, and we enjoyed each other’s company. Kim was adopted from Korea, and Scott M’s parents were Native American. Looking back now, I realize something I didn’t see then – in our small, predominantly white town, Mrs. Sharp’s classroom held a disproportionate number of students who looked ‘different.’ Betty was one of the few Black children in our school. Kim was Asian. Scott M. was Native American. Even I carried a difference in my blood – my grandfather was Native American, though you’d never know it looking at my freckled face and flame-red hair. It seems too deliberate to be a coincidence.
I imagine the principal might have called it something progressive-sounding – ‘cultural accommodation grouping’ or ‘specialized needs clustering.’ The 70s were full of such well-intentioned labels that masked less noble realities. Whatever the administrative reasoning, it had delivered into Mrs. Sharp’s hands the very children she seemed to resent most.
At ten years old, I didn’t fully grasp the weight of all the words spilling out of her mouth, but I understood its poison. She hadn’t just insulted Scott – she had weaponized an entire group of people to do it. In one cruel moment, she had used the identity of others as a punishment against Scott – a double cruelty that made my stomach turn.
It was then, she grabbed Scott P. by the shoulder of his shirt, marched him in front of the class, and made him stick that stencil in his mouth again and show the class while she provided a torturous narration in the background.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. Mrs. Sharp’s classroom ran on a cruel economy of favorites and outcasts. Even those of us in her good graces weren’t safe – Scott P. was in the ‘smart’ group, yet she wielded his intelligence against him like a weapon. ‘You’re supposed to be smart,’ she’d sneer. ‘You should act like it.’ As if intelligence were a debt we owed her, payable in perfect behavior. We navigated a daily symphony of behaviors where she glorified select students and crucified others.
Each evening, our family would gather around the family dinner table and talk about our day. Once that story hit the table, I think mom and dad may have revisited that choice to not hand-pick teachers. I saw the look on their faces. When we talked about it later in life, she always alluded to there being a silent chapter, but, to her credit, and not to my curiosity, she kept it to herself. I always wondered if she had spoken to the principal. I think, knowing my mother and how much she valued the profession and children, I’d bet she did.
“What kind of memory do you want to be in your students’ heads?” I ask this of my teacher candidates. Classroom memories live on in the heads of your students for the rest of their lives. You can be the foundational memory that children build upon, or you can be that memory slithering around for a lifetime like a viper in the grass, sharing its venom remembrance after remembrance.
Creating a classroom culture is important. It takes skill and craftsmanship. Craftsmanship may be a word you wonder if it is appropriate, but I argue it is right on target. As the instructor, you are building and crafting your classroom culture.
That moment in Mrs. Sharp’s classroom created ripples that are still moving through time. It shaped how I advocate for students, how I train teachers, and how I recognize the sacred trust placed in educators’ hands. It made me vigilant about my own words, my own biases, my own power to wound or heal.
Forty-odd years later, I can still see the sunlight on Scott’s tear-stained face. I can still feel the sick drop in my stomach. I can still feel Betty across the room and see the look on her face. We were all changed that day – Scott, who learned he could be diminished for a childish joke; Betty and our other non-white classmates, who learned their very existence could be used as an insult; and those of us who witnessed it, who learned that sometimes adults fail us in spectacular ways.
This is why I am so insistent about classroom climate, about choosing words carefully, about examining bias, with my teacher candidates. Mrs. Sharp taught me the most important lesson of my educational career: the profound and lasting power of a teacher’s words. I just learned it from the wrong end of the lesson plan.
Choose your words as carefully as a craftsman chooses tools. Build with kindness. Measure with fairness. Create with love. Because long after the multiplication tables fade and the state capitals are forgotten, your students will remember exactly how you made them feel.