Radical redhead Miss Smith
She may have been a lesbian with multiple piercings, but she could teach right-wing Christian girls to love Richard Wright.

BY JENN SHREVE
She had a first name, but it has long since been purged from memory. I remember her now simply as Miss Smith, my sophomore high school English teacher. She was short and stout, with strong Irish features and brilliant orange hair. Six piercings clung to each ear, and she was obviously, though not openly, gay in a town where "tolerance," even in the late 1980s when I attended high school, was still a dirty word.

Salinas High School will never go down in history as being academically rigorous. Our junior year analysis of Hester Prynne's sad saga was limited to embroidering a Scarlet "A." I received a B in geometry, despite consistent C test scores, because I could sneak off campus without getting caught and pick up a bagel and Coke for our long-tenured math teacher. We watched and discussed "Geraldo" in government civics. Independent thinking was discouraged: I was thrown out of American history for asserting out loud that the women's movement was a good thing, and removed from sex ed. for questioning the maxim that students should "pet your dog, not your date."

Miss Smith was different. She taught, and I, for one, was grateful to finally learn. Each week, we spent 15 minutes of class time free-writing in a journal. Writing was valuable, she told us, and it was important to make a habit of it. She checked our journals to make sure we'd filled them with actual words, but promised not to scan for content -- and I believed her. Her simple tips on making oneself clearer in writing, in addition to keeping a journal, I follow to this day.

She was my first and only teacher prior to college who said that words -- written or read -- had value in the world. Smith admonished us to become articulate as a key to future success. She praised the humanities as essential to becoming well-rounded human beings.

I was as bored and frustrated, rebellious and misunderstood as any 15-year-old -- perhaps even more so: I suffered a breakdown my sophomore year of high school that manifested in self-mutilation and heavy drug and alcohol use. In the midst of my personal agony, Smith's piercings and unconventional teaching style appealed to the part of me that longed to be challenged and treated with respect.

And Miss Smith did two things that changed my life for good. She assigned "Black Boy" by Richard Wright and she started me on a career in journalism.

Like Wright's, my childhood was marked by poverty and both physical and verbal abuse. But I had never before seen my experience reflected in anything I'd read. Wright turned to writing and literature as a way to exorcize his demons, an example -- with Smith's encouragement -- I quickly emulated. I decided that I wanted to be a writer. With Smith's help, a classmate and I revived our high school newspaper, the Flashlight. Smith told me I was a promising writer, and never commented on the extreme right-wing bent my writing took on -- a strange, brief manifestation of my heavily religious upbringing and visits with a born-again psychotherapist. Though I was almost immediately censored by the administration for excessive muckraking and mocked by fellow students who put out groovier-than-thou zines, the taste for self-expression via the printed word stuck with me.

I look back and think: Miss Smith was just doing her job. Fortunately for me, she did it well. Last I heard, she was no longer teaching. Perhaps the low pay and the hostile learning environment drove her to seek another career. If so, the world is poorer for it. Yet even as I write these words, her teaching is still at work.
SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

More teachers we loved:
+ Remembrance of things present By Carol Lloyd
+ Greek love By Hank Hyena
+ The vocabulary of wonder By Scott Rosenberg
+ Teaching by daydream By Chris Colin
+ One valentine too late By Karen Templer
+ My Latin love affair By Andrew Leonard
+ The warlock of grammar By Fiona Morgan

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