Coloring Lessons

At some point during our school years every one of us (except my wife) felt like we were unfairly targeted or corrected by a teacher with an arbitrarily narrow sense of what was normal or acceptable, and for the most part the 'victims' didn't really seem to be too bothered by it (water off a duck's back and all that). So I guess there's really nothing out of the ordinary about my stories except that (for some reason) they affected me very deeply (probably that overblown sense of injustice). It started in kindergarten and snowballed from there (details to follow in future entries).

And today's topic is coloring...

My kindergarten teacher was Laverne Brinkmann. I'm not really sure what her malfunction was. It was kind of inexplicable. Maybe she was just mad because her parents named her Laverne. Who knows... :-)
Regardless - one of the kids at my table had problems with coloring (at least Laverne thought so). She was constantly berating him for not staying in the lines. And one day he committed the unforgivable sin of coloring his ice cream blue...
Now we're talking 1958/59 here... Hawaii and Alaska were just in the process of becoming states... Man had not yet flown in space... And (apparently) there were only 4 acceptable flavors of ice cream - vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and Neapolitan (a combination of those 3).
Laverne went off the deep end! She ridiculed him in front of the whole class and made him color over the blue with one of the 'approved' colors. That (obviously) just made it look worse, but nonetheless it seemed to satisfy her sense of 'normalcy'. And I can't begin to describe how bad I felt for that kid. I wished there were something I could do about it but I really couldn't think of anything...

And then a few weeks later it happened to me:
On the way to school we passed a field where the fire department was putting out a grass fire. And the field was black! I was totally amazed - I hadn't ever thought about what happens to grass when it burns. So when it came to coloring time I selected a picture of a pasture and colored the grass black...
That turned out to be a really bad idea. Laverne flipped out when she saw it! I tried to explain about the grass fire but she just kept yelling "Grass is green" over and over. Now here's the really stupid part:
She made me color green over the black... Seriously! I'm not kidding about this... I mean I wasn't a genius or anything (actually I was but that's not the point) but even I knew that when you mix black and green you get black. I told her that and she said she didn't care - do it anyway. So I colored green over the black. It was totally pointless but it made her happy.

Sigh - she was so amazingly narrow minded I've often wondered if her head exploded during the late 60s :-)

In fairness I should say that she wasn't all that bad of a teacher - I learned a lot. But I was in constant fear of crossing the invisible line into 'abnormal'. I don't know - maybe learning to be 'normal' was the whole point of education in the late 50s :-)

But I still don't think that's any way to run an educational system...