Schoolhouse Fauna

There is a theory, especially prevalent on the Pacific coast, that when prose is printed in vertical snatches it becomes poetry. A current convert to this theory is Novelist Rupert Hughes, who has written an introduction for a book* by a Miss Virginia Church, California schoolteacher, in which he says she reminds him of Edgar Lee Masters and Sappho. He calls her pages "poems," a definition which may mislead other schoolteachers or puzzle them when they read what are really excerpts from an observant, slightly sentimental diary filled with familiar schoolhouse fauna. Samples:

"What pleased me most was when Mike exclaimed: 'Gee, Miss Brown, you're not a bit like a teacher; you're so human.' . . . Are we wrong, I wonder, offering Art Appreciation and Workshop along with Arithmetic? . . . Yesterday I had a letter from Ned Thompson thanking me for persuading him to go to Yale. . . . Before I came to high school, I taught in the grades. Each morning Ikey Stein brought me roses which he had gathered in the cemetery. Patsy O'Reilly presented me with three battered toothbrushes; his father was a garbage collector. . . . I banged down the top of my desk; I should correct no more deadening papers that day. The tap at my door proved to be Kate. She'd something, she said, she'd like to show me. . . . There were five hundred sheets entitled 'Soul Thoughts.'

"The other day our lady Vice-Principal got onto a street car. She was wearing a brand new dress. I heard a woman in the seat back of me remark to her friend: 'Ain't it awful the way these women dress? You can't tell school teachers from ladies now a days.' . . . Tom shambled into my conference room and lounged in a chair; the pool of his clear honest eyes was troubled. He liked the girl, he said, awfully, but he wished she'd not 'paw' him, they weren't engaged or anything. Last evening he'd told her so; in fact had gone into it at some length. When he'd finished she'd said: 'Oh, Tom, I just love to hear you talk like that! Kiss me, sweetie.' And she'd sat on his lap. What was he to do?

"I refused the invitation to the mountains; I corrected two hundred papers over the weekend, themes, grammar tests, and spelling. When I returned them to the morning class, 'Brick' chucked his into the wastebasket with a 'Gee, somebody spilled the red ink!' How to make them care! . . . Miss Skelton teaches chemistry; she is a faithful worker for the Y. W. C. A. Mr. Mince tips his hat to her every morning; I've seen her flush at his audacity. Sometime I'm going to lock them in the Study Hall and compromise them."

*TEACHERS ARE PEOPLE--Virginia Church-- Wallace Hebberd ($2).

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