Enough Sense to Come In Out of the Rain

She doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain, said my friend and professional education colleague. He was speaking about a first grade teacher at my school, a school reputed to be the best in the region.  The teacher he was referring to, Miss Trimble (name changed to protect the guilty), was probably in her fortieth year of teaching first grade, and she was on automatic pilot. 

 She was always a bit slow to react when you spoke to her, especially if you used “grown-up” words.  She relied mostly on stock phrases, such as “now boys and girls” and “let’s all walk quietly to…” and “young man, I’m going to have to send a note home to your mother.” 

Miss Trimble relied on her longevity at the school to get away with a number of rule infractions, namely parking in the principal’s spot, and failing to pull in close to the curb, so that her 1957 Dodge stuck a mile out into the parking lot.  And she let her class go five minutes early to lunch so that they got the “good” seats in the cafeteria.  If admonished by the cafeteria manager, she’d look around very vaguely and say “oh, I didn’t REALIZE we were early.”   

She knitted through every faculty meeting and waited until the very last minute to comment on the idea under discussion, and her comment was always the same, “We tried something similar 15 years ago and it didn’t work.”   You get the drift.

Miss Trimble didn’t much approve of how I ran my classroom.  We did science “activities” almost every day, with the kids out of their seats in groups, chatting and sometimes showing excitement.  This was a scandal in her eyes.  

 “Not the way I was trained’’, she’d say. 

"Times change,” I’d say. 

“More’s the pity,” she’d say.

Anyhow, my friend might have been right when he said she didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.  Maybe it wasn’t part of her training.