Mincey’s Musings
Year Two, Week Twenty-Five

I had the privilege of seeing several of my elementary school classmates during the past month. One of them, my friend Kevin White, reminded me of a circumstance that happened in third grade.

That was the year we received new reading books. I was not impressed—whereas I found the stories in our older series interesting, the first story in our new book Panorama was titled “The Snake in the Carpool”. I did not like snakes, and had little interest in anything to do with them. But take a not (at least to me) very interesting reading book, and give it to a legendary teacher like the great Florence Chesney to teach, and it became motivational.

Kevin remembered that Ms. Chesney had me memorize an entire story from that reading book about an aardvark named Arthur. She taught me how to read it dramatically, to use the proper inflection and hand and body motions to dramatize it. She encouraged me to enter the school talent show, directed by none other than our great music teacher Aleene Griffith. I won third place, if to no one else’s amazement, at least to my own. The details are a little foggy with age, but I do remember that this somehow earned me the privilege to travel to Big Ridge Elementary and Horace Maynard High to do my presentation.

In later years, as Ms. Chesney and I reminisced about this, she told me that she never asked my father’s permission for me to take that trip. She was afraid that if she asked he would have said no, and she wanted me to have the opportunity to expand my horizons even this little bit. She decided to take the risk, let me go and pray that nothing happened to me. She said she was greatly relieved when I returned safely to school.

I also went to church with Ms. Chesney. I never actually participated in the Christmas plays as a performer, but I always read an introductory Christmas poem at the beginning of the service. It was really not a big deal, but it was to Florence Chesney! She would praise me to the highest Heaven in front of my parents, encouraging them to encourage me. Florence Chesney could honestly convince me that it was possible for me to do anything if I put my mind to it.

Sometimes the stars just align—at a later age not even the great Florence Chesney could have convinced me to perform in front of hundreds of Union County students, but who knows? I remember once in her retirement Ms. Chesney substituted for Martha Warwick in our seventh grade homeroom. We were practicing our 4-H club meeting. Ms. Chesney didn’t seem to think we were doing very well with our singing. In the space of the few minutes we had before traveling to our afternoon classes, Ms. Chesney had us energized, excited, and belting out whatever it was we were trying to sing.

I wish I could say that I was a great motivational teacher like Ms. Chesney, but I know I fell far short of that lofty goal. In my travels throughout Union County as a supervisor for the school system, I look for teachers who have the same ability to motivate their students to excel. I have seen many great teachers both in this and other districts, but I can only at present think of one who comes close in my estimation.

And I find it amazing that what the “experts” are now trying to put forth as the latest, most effective teaching methods pale in comparison to what we had in Florence Chesney. It has been forty-five years since I left her class, but I think of her daily and know that mine and many other lives were changed forever for the better because of her love and dedication to her students and the teaching profession.

Even today I marvel at my former ability to memorize. I believe that memorization is definitely a learned skill. Though my ability seems to have deteriorated with age, we memorized everything in elementary school—multiplication tables, states and capitals, poetry. I memorized the poem “If” in seventh grade in Kate Ray’s spelling and writing class. In seventh grade Ms. Martha Warwick taught us the names of the major bones of the body. In high school Mr. James K. Palazzola had us memorize the rules for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of positive and negative numbers. Ms. Eileen Monroe had us memorize several poems, and the saintly Mr. Harrell Edmondson had us memorize the Preamble to the Constitution in civics class. I had already memorized that one, thanks to “Schoolhouse Rock” on early morning Saturday television of my childhood. I still recite it today with the tune in my head.

Now, times are different. There seems not enough time to memorize entire stories. Poetry and “dead white men and women’s” literature is no longer in vogue. Cursive writing and civics had for years pretty much ceased to be taught in Tennessee’s public schools. No need to memorize facts, just ask Google or some of her more modern sister technologies to feed information with little or no human mental effort. I wonder if there will be a tremendous upsurge in Alzheimer’s and dementia rates for future generations who do not have to exercise their brains through memorization, calculation and other thinking tasks?

I wonder if some of the teachers of my childhood and youth could return to this earth for a day if they would feel all the effort they put into educating future generations was in vain? There is hope—I hear rumblings of cursive writing possibly making a return to our public schools, and Tennessee lawmakers have passed legislation requiring students to pass a civics examination as a prerequisite for high school graduation. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 (King James Version) says:

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done:
and there is no new thing under the sun.”