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When my daughter Mary Bin was in kindergarten, we lived in
The story came out through other parents, mostly the parents of boys, and mostly parents who had open channels of communication with their children. And when I asked Mary Bin much later why she never mentioned any of this, she said, "Mrs. Porter told us not to tell our parents or we'd get in trouble."
"In trouble" was a serious thing in Mrs. Porter's class. It meant that you would be put into a dark closet with the door locked. And you would stay there until Mrs. Porter was ready to let you out. After you've seen a couple of your classmates treated that way, you'd do pretty much whatever it took to avoid being "in trouble" with Mrs. Porter.
Mrs. Porter loved to have the children draw. Kindergartens are big on drawing, which teaches small-motor skills and helps little fingers to learn to hold crayons and pencils. Mrs. Porter would tape to the blackboard a banal printed picture that she herself had colored in advance. She then gave each child a copy of the picture and told them to color it just as she had: red sweater for the boy, blue sky, green grass, black and white cow. Whatever. But when she said she wanted it to be exactly like hers, she really meant it.
As the children colored, Mrs. Porter prowled the room, watching them. And if a child deviated from her color scheme, she swooped down on that child, whipped the crayon out of his hand (for it was usually a boy that she attacked), and bent his fingers back, one at a time. Just enough to be painful and scary. Not enough to break a finger, of course.
Mrs. Porter was firmly entrenched in the local "education" system, despite being unsuited to the task. She had the full support of her principal. But this was the late '60s, and many of her pupils' parents that year were politically active graduate students. They were too smart and too aware of the rights of their children to stand for this. So the parents of Mrs. Porter's kindergarten class revolted, demanded a meeting of the school board (after the principal had been no help at all), and succeeded in getting Mrs. Porter transferred. At first she was transferred to a desk job with the Board. But after several months we heard that she had been sent to teach kindergarten at another school.
And for the rest of that year Mary Bin's kindergarten class was subjected to an endless string of substitute teachers who had no interest in the children. When I mentioned this lack of continuity to the principal one day, he said that it wasn't his fault. It was the fault of those shortsighted parents who had insisted on removing Mrs. Porter, a fine teacher, from the classroom.
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