XXII

THE PROTOCOL for teachers was severe. We were to refer to one another only by our last names and never utter our first. I was Mrs. Williams even though I was only twenty-one years old. After each class the children would make a line, and before leaving, they were obliged to shake my hand and say, “Thank you for the beautiful lesson, Mrs. Williams,” whether my lessons deserved praise or not.

In the fall of 1976, I was hired as a biology teacher at the Carden School, known for its conservative philosophy. I didn’t care. I just wanted to teach. I would have my own classroom and instruct first grade through ninth. Each grade would come to my class twice a week.

The headmistress was a tall, stern woman named Mrs. Jeffs. Together with her husband, Mr. Jeffs, they had created the Carden School of Salt Lake City. They were staunch members of the John Birch Society. The dress code for the school was modest: no open-toed shoes, toes are unattractive; dresses must cover the knee; and hats were encouraged. My ski hats were not.

When given these instructions, I agreed they were rules I could live by. Brooke’s mother, Rosemary, made me a dress out of fabric that depicted a marsh. It was a yellow cotton jersey print with cattails and dragonflies. I loved it, and wore it for the school pictures. Mrs. Jeffs found my outfit a distraction.

“It is best not to advertise one’s subject by wearing it,” she said.

Even so, they gave me the key to my classroom, and I immediately set out to decorate it. I purchased a window hive, complete with honeybees and a queen who had access to the outside. Their social workings would be visible to the students.

I cut out letters from green construction paper that read BIOLOGY: THE STUDY OF LIFE. I brought in rocks and feathers and shells. Filled the shelves with field guides and all manner of books on the natural world. I created a mountain landscape on the bulletin board, which I imagined the children would populate with their own drawings of local birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish, insects, and plants. It was thrilling to create an atmosphere that I hoped would inspire students to investigate “nature.”

My last gesture of the day was to write on the chalkboard, “Welcome. My name is Mrs. Williams. What do you see out the window?” I clapped my hands to get rid of the chalk dust, turned off the lights, and closed the door behind me. School would begin in two weeks. The next day, Brooke and I left for Alaska.

Fresh from Denali National Park, I returned to Carden excited to teach my first class of second graders, only to find my room completely dismantled. Vandalized? Where were the bees, the rocks, my shells? Why had the blackboard been erased and the cutout letters removed? Thirty minutes before class I walked down the hall into Mrs. Jeffs’s office.

“Come in,” she said. “Welcome home, Mrs. Williams. What can I do for you?”

“Mrs. Jeffs, something terrible has happened. Everything in my room is gone.”

“The best learning occurs in a clean environment, Mrs. Williams. Is there anything else we need to discuss?”

I was speechless.

“Mr. Jeffs removed the clutter. And beginning today, you will never use the word biology with our students.”

“Excuse me?”

“The word biology is inappropriate for our students.”

“I thought that’s what I was hired to teach.”

Mrs. Jeffs stood up and straightened her brown wool skirt and walked around from her large desk. “Science, Mrs. Williams. You have been hired to teach science. The word biology denotes sexual reproduction, and we will have none of that here at Carden.” She looked over my shoulder. “I believe you have a group of students waiting for you.”

And so began my first day as a teacher at Carden School in Salt Lake City.

Because I fell in love with the children, I learned to work around the eccentricities of the Jeffses. I actually admired Mrs. Jeffs’s capacity to teach, especially her classes in reading and literature, which I was required to watch. Students were mesmerized by her gift of storytelling. She loved the classics and believed in reading out loud. She invited the students to imagine their own plots, anticipating what direction the author might take them. Huckleberry Finn, floating on a hand-made raft down the Mississippi River with his friend Jim, might as well have been heading toward Great Salt Lake.

And when she discussed Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar with a class of ninth graders, they speculated on how Caesar transformed the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. What followed was a conversation about leadership.

Literature was life, and reading became an open door to a world beyond the familiar. Students both loved her and feared her. There was a depth to her pedagogy that I never fully understood. Once, when a particular class of mine was completely out of control, I walked out of the classroom into the hall, closed the door, and leaned against it in tears. Mrs. Jeffs walked by.

“Is there a problem, Mrs. Williams?”

“No, Mrs. Jeffs.”

“Just remember, your classroom is a mirror of yourself,” she said, walking briskly to her office.

 

It was the height of the Save the Whales movement in the 1970s, and I was as enthralled as anyone by the plight of the cetaceans. I read Joan McIntyre’s Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins, published by the Sierra Club in 1975, the year Brooke and I were married.

Mimi took me on whale-watching excursions off the coast of California, where we were eye to eye with gray whales, seeing them breach, tasting salt water on our lips as the whale’s fluke, so close, slapped the sea before it descended. Mimi talked about a place called Esalen, in Big Sur, where inter-species communication was taking place, including actual sex between women and dolphins. Anything was possible. The silver-gray whale pendant I wore around my neck on a cord of leather was not emblematic, but religious.

My first graders were also in love with whales. I covered the tall windows with blue paper, moved all the desks and chairs to the side, and turned off the lights.

I turned on the record player and put on Roger Payne’s album Songs of the Humpback Whale.

We discussed how whales were threatened and how difficult it was for them to find one another in the enormity of the sea. I invited the children to lie down on the floor and close their eyes as they listened to the humpbacks’ haunting, deep, sonorous cries. The children began wildly, joyously swimming around the room, not only imagining what it might be like to be a whale, but becoming one. I turned up the volume and joined them.

Suddenly the door shot open, the lights flashed on, and I heard the scratch of the needle on the record as the whale songs abruptly ended.

“What on Earth is this?” said Mrs. Jeffs.

“We are whales looking for our mates…” a first grader cried out, now upright on his knees.

What I remember next was being led out of the classroom by a very angry headmistress. I don’t think she had me by the ear, but she might have.

I was immediately escorted to her office. She called for Mr. Jeffs through the intercom. I sat. She sat tapping her fingers on the brown leather pad engraved in gold that covered her desk. Mr. Jeffs came running into her office with his sensible shoes that never made a sound on the shiny floors.

“Yes, Mrs. Jeffs?”

Mrs. Jeffs told him of the shock she had seen, how she heard “the most terrifying sounds coming from Mrs. Williams’s classroom.” He looked more stunned than she did, all six feet four inches of him. They disappeared into an alcove and whispered.

When they returned, I was interrogated.

“Mrs. Williams, we have one question for you, and you had better think hard before you answer it.”

There was a long pause.

“Are you an E n v i r o n m e n t a l i s t?” Mrs. Jeffs asked, drawing out the word, as they both stared at me.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“We thought so!” Mr. Jeffs said.

“We had our suspicions when you and Mr. Williams went to Alaska and did not carry a gun,” Mrs. Jeffs added.

Mr. Jeffs leaned toward me. “Did you know that the Devil is an environmentalist?”

“No, I did not,” I replied.

And I was fired.

As I got up to leave, Mr. Jeffs turned to Mrs. Jeffs and said, “But what will we tell the children if Mrs. Williams is no longer here?”

Mrs. Jeffs looked out her window for a long time. “You have a point. It would be difficult to explain. They do like her.”

She looked at me. “Mrs. Williams, we know you love the children, and they obviously enjoy you. Why you had them swimming on the filthy floor calling to one another as whales is something I never want to think about again, much less see repeated.” She paused, with a quick glance at Mr. Jeffs. “We will consider rehiring you on the following condition: You must never again bring your politics into a Carden classroom. The children must never know that you are an—”

“An environmentalist,” I said.

“Precisely.”

I promised with my own condition. “And I would ask that you not walk into my classroom unannounced.”

We shook hands, and I walked back into an empty classroom, which still emanated a blue glow from the covered windows.

I taught at Carden for five years. Loved it. Loved the children and all I learned from them. In the end, Mrs. Jeffs and I respected each other. Teaching helped me find my voice through the creativity of translations. The challenge was to impart large ecological concepts to young, burgeoning minds in a language that wasn’t polemical, but woven into a compelling story. My task as a teacher was to honor the integrity of fact while at the same time igniting the students’ imagination. To create an atmosphere where each child felt free to explore their own questions without fear of being reprimanded was my greatest pleasure.

Rachel Carson wrote, “If a child is to keep alive his in-born sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”

What Mrs. Jeffs never realized, and I came to learn, was that a shared love of nature was the most political act of all. Finding one’s voice is a process of finding one’s passion. I found my voice in teaching. My curriculum became the children’s curiosity. I trusted wherever it would lead us. We played. We experimented. We drew, and we wrote about the world around us. The children brought the outside in. We watched a praying mantis prey on her mate and spin an egg sac on a stick and die from exhaustion. Her green arms were locked around what she had created. The next spring, a chain of baby mantises emerged from the egg sac. Even Mr. and Mrs. Jeffs became enthused about new life in Room 8.

 

One day, Lee Chouquette, a nine-year-old mathematical genius, asked if he could help me teach our class about the velocity of the solar system in relationship to an expanding and contracting universe. He saw I was struggling. The success of any teacher is to recognize what one doesn’t know. Ted Major had taught me well. So a child who understood quantum physics but had never learned how to skip took our class outside to the playground and arranged us according to planetary orbits. He placed me at the center as the sun. One child became Mercury, running very fast around me. Another child was Venus, another Earth, each one moving according to the statistics Lee had calculated in his head. He gave Saturn an extra challenge, to spin a hula hoop around her waist while still moving forward in a circle, and Pluto stood in the parking lot, never moving at all. It was a visual lesson none of us forgot and each of us internalized. When the solar system had been set in motion, Lee lay on the lawn and moved from a fetal position to a stretch, expanding and contracting. No one asked who he was or what he was doing, but clearly he had a vision.

Lee now hires himself out as a wedding DJ through his business, called Cloud 10 Entertainment. Lee Chouquette’s day job is as a software engineer. The bass notes of our voice are found in what we do naturally.