As America approaches another presidential election that’s almost guaranteed to leave at least half the nation somewhere between disillusioned and apoplectic, I can’t help thinking about my middle school English and social studies teacher.
Miss Cooney must have been a good history teacher. She’s the sole reason I still remember that the fertile crescent, consisting of Sumer and Mesopotamia, was located near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
And my ability to differentiate between nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives speaks to her effectiveness as an English teacher, although she’ll have to share credit for whatever level of literacy I’ve attained with Mrs. Hartley, Mr. Desser, Miss Shanley, Miss Bittner, Mr. Fusco, Mrs. Weston, Mrs. Martin, Mr. Cox, and the other English teachers whose classrooms I took up space in.
But Miss Cooney’s greatest impact involved the student council. As newly minted fifth graders, my classmates and I were middle school neophytes, and it was up to our social studies teachers to not only introduce us to the concept of student government, but to find candidates who were willing and able to serve as class representatives.
Miss Cooney stressed the importance and gravity of the student council. Which, in retrospect, she may have been doing for the sole purpose of discouraging people like me and my similarly immature pals from taking part in the process.
“Student council is important,” she intoned. “Only serious people should consider running for representative; it’s not a popularity contest.”
She needn’t have worried about me running for one of those council seats. I was too busy playing whatever sport was in season and vying for the title of class clown to take the time to actually write a speech I’d subsequently have to deliver to my peers at an all-school assembly.
And even if I’d had the courage and work ethic required to do all that, the possibility of losing an election was more than enough to keep me away from participating. If there was anything more important to 11-year-old me than achieving acceptance and popularity, I wasn’t aware of it.
Looking back, Miss Cooney’s patience and skills as an educator must have done me some good. True, she told my mother I was an underachiever, but I can’t hold that against her, particularly since it was true.
At least she didn’t add “disruptive influence,” like a certain art teacher who shall remain nameless did. And for the record, those other spitball-shooting, clay-throwing kids didn’t need me to encourage them; they were more than capable of being disruptions on their own.
Miss Cooney died long ago. But if reincarnation truly exists and one’s future life is based upon what they did or didn’t do in their previous one, she ought to be living a charmed existence, albeit inside a new outer shell, and with a different name. She deserves at least that much.
But though I doubt she meant to, Miss Cooney misinformed us about one important thing. American elections truly are popularity contests.
And seeing what blindly ambitious and/or selfishly motivated individuals are willing to do to make themselves or the candidate(s) they work for more popular, it’s no wonder that come November 6, I may well be one of the people referenced in this essay’s initial sentence. <
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