Missus Dorothy Crawford taught geometry at Abraham Lincoln High School when I was fifteen. She was a large woman; not fat, but quite tall and -- as they say -- big boned. She was a woman who obviously, if she had not become a teacher, would have become a real-life Mame. She was outrageously outgoing, colorful, irreverent. She was fond of wearing brightly colored clothing and huge clumps of jewelry not only around her neck but on her wrists as well. And, the jewelry was usually strings of quarter or half-inch orbs which would click constantly with her incessant movement about the classroom and by her habit of fingering the orbs; a calculatingly self-induced click, click, clickclickclickclickclickclickclick which helped to produce the atmosphere of her classroom.
Missus Crawford taught geometry. And, Missus Crawford taught us a great deal about life, as well.
"Alright," she would holler -- she never merely spoke -- let's discuss what I have put up on the chalkboard." She would then rise from behind her desk, begin fingering her orbs and walk to the back of the classroom, behind us ... the silence of the room broken only by the click, click, clickclickclickclickclickclick of her jewelry.
The figures on the chalkboard would be a few of the problems we had been sent home the day before to solve.
"Mister Richardson," Missus Crawford would suddenly scream from behind our backs, "tell me about the problem marked number one."
Mister Richardson who, like the rest of us, was attempting to catch his breath from the shock of Missus Crawford's unseen although not unexpected outburst from his rear, studied number one for a moment and said, "Isosceles triangle."
Click.
"Any fool knows that, Mister Richardson," she would shout, moving silently to Mister Richardson and placing her big-boned grasp on his shoulders. "Tell me something about problem one that any fool does not know," she would say, applying pressure to her hold on his shoulder.
Clickclickclickclick. Click.
"Ah," Mister Richardson would say. Dale Richardson was a good-hearted boy who was, I believe, one of Missus Crawford's fools who would never catch on to the program; who would never understand the point of Missus Crawford's geometry class.
"Thank you, Mister Richardson," Missus Crawford would say after Dale Richardson's silence had, once again, formed a heavy, oppressive, uncomfortable pall over the classroom. "Miss Montgomery," she would then scream and Miss Montgomery would recite one-hundred and fifty things we all should know about an isosceles triangle; the unseen things which are whispered by reasoning called deductive which, obviously, Miss Montgomery had picked up somewhere along the way. Equal sides, the angles, the result of bisecting and that of turning it on its side. Miss Montgomery's dissection of problem one left the utter, essential, unseen -- but nevertheless there -- guts of the isosceles triangle hanging palpably from the ceiling to the floor.
After Miss Montgomery had finished her recitation, the resulting excitement from Missus Crawford would erupt with, "Yes! Yes! Yes! It's there! This is not geometry we are talking about," she would scream, barging to the front of the classroom, holding her arms extended as if directing a choir in adulation of a God more robustly Baptist than Catholic. "This is life, ladies and gentlemen. Look at it, study it, know it. There is so much more here than any fool is capable of seeing. And you are not fools. You are not! Believe it! You are so much more than what you see when you look in the mirror. We all are. If the isosceles triangle is more than what it appears to be -- Glory Be! -- you and you and you," she would say, pointing at our faces and clicking to beat the band, "are infinitely more than what you see and infinitely capable of achieving your most outrageous dreams."
Silence.
Click. Click.
"Mister Anderson," she would bellow, moving to the back of the room, "problem two."
Missus Crawford is a remembered teacher from a time when American education was still devoted to the insistence that students learn without the empty and phony rhetoric of politicians demanding that no child be left behind.
I suspect no teacher would ask of their students any higher honor than to be remembered.
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