Thank you, Mrs. Pardue
I don't remember a lot of my teachers throughout the years. One downside of moving a lot is that later in life it's hard to keep up with who was where, and what happened in each place. Many of my memories are of houses and backyards and family stuff, since many people came and went without the opportunity to store as many details about them as the rooms I had, or the yards I played in, or the times with my family when there was no one else to play with.

But a few teachers do stand out, and today I share the story of my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Pardue. She was quite a character, and unfortunately for her, her class was the arena for my first steps into mischief and rebellion.

I was a quiet kid, keeping to myself and observing more than participating. I was very smart, and school was easy. I always made my parents proud with good grades and awards and teachers beaming about how good I was. It's the relationships that I found difficult. Every few years it seemed I was in a new school with all new people, so I was way too used to the 'trying to fit in where I wasn't sure I belonged' routine. I never quite connected with people, and then it was time to go again. It always took me awhile to warm up to people and come out of my shell, and by then we were off to a new place.

By the fifth grade, inklings of rebellion began to set in, and Mrs. Pardue's class was the perfect stage for my emergence as a troublemaker. I'd been in this school for a couple of years, so I'd developed a few friends that I could run with. I was beginning to feel more sure of myself. As the oldest kids in the school before heading off to the big junior highschool, I began to let 'fifth grade-itis' go to my head.

Mrs. Pardue was such an easy mark, she almost begged to be the butt of many jokes and pranks. And the more little things I did at her expense that received laughter and attention from my classmates, the more I was encouraged by that to play the role of class clown. Of course, I was discouraged in this role by Mrs. Pardue herself. But my peers loved my antics, and they usually won.

Looking back, I feel sorry for Mrs. Pardue. She was an odd character, and she may not have known how odd she was. Or maybe she didn't care. She drove a giant white four-door boat-of-a-car of some sort. It was a loud car. Everyday we would see her coming up the hill in the parking lot, heading for her parking spot in the morning before school started. For some reason she always drove with her head out the window, like she couldn't see through her perfectly clear, non-cracked windshield. With her head and her arm hanging out, the car-boat would heave itself up the hill, finally resting with a sigh in her spot.

The car was a great source of curiosity for many of us. We'd wait for her to go inside the building, then we'd sneak over to the car to peer inside the windows. It became an on-going source of entertainment for us to see what was in the backseat of Mrs. Pardue's car every morning. Once we discovered a giant flotation device, fully inflated, crammed in the backseat. It was like one of those flat things you float around on in a pool. Another time we found a sleeping bag rolled up on the floor. After we made these discoveries, we were hooked, and came back to the car as often as we could to get a peak. We could only imagine what crazy things she had hidden in her trunk.

Once we made it inside for class early in the morning, Mrs. Pardue had the same routine. She would go to her Teacher's Closet, and rummage around in it for awhile. Every classroom had a closet for the teachers to keep their personal belongings locked away from curious students, such as we were. Mrs. Pardue would go to the closet, take off her coat, intensely clean her glasses with a cloth, and fervently brush her hair to calm it down. She had wildly curly hair, made even more wild by the breezy drive up the hill with her head stuck out the window.

She also kept a suitcase in the classroom, but not in the closet. She kept that under her desk. It was blue. We could all see it, but no one ever tried to sneek a peek. Until I got it in my head that would be a good idea, that is. One day Mrs. Pardue was called down to the office for a few minutes, and when these few minutes would occur on occassion, the class took that as opportunity to go crazy for awhile. Even with our appointed 'classroom monitor', we'd laugh in the face of a fellow student's authority, and get down to the mischievous business at hand.

So on this particular day I ventured over to the suitcase to check it out. She'd left it out on the counter today, for some reason. Like she'd just been in it, but hadn't put it away before the morning bell rang. It was closed, but still inviting me over for a look. I opened it and found . . . clothes. Including underwear. I didn't quite know what to make of it, but I felt certain it would be funny to see her underwear swinging around the room on the ceiling fan.

I wasn't actually brave enough to do this, so I closed the suitcase, reported my findings to the class, and made it back to my seat as Mrs. Pardue returned. I kept the information in mind, in case I needed it one day in the future.

Throughout my time in Mrs. Pardue's class, I thoroughly exasperated her on more than one occassion, holding up class regularly. I was often caught talking to my neighbor, and was moved quite literally to every desk in the room by the end of my year sentence in that class. She always thought moving me to a new seat would solve the problem of my talking during class, but I would manage to strike up conversations wherever I was sent. I developed the knack for making funny comments during teaching time, which were always rewarded with giggles from classmates close by. Thoroughly disruptive almost every time.

The problem was that I would always finish my work in record time. While other students were still suffering through worksheets, I was finished and looking for something else to do. Trouble was what I ususally found. Mrs. Pardue eventually solved this problem by putting me in the least popular seat in the classroom- the seat right by her desk. And she assigned me some extra work. That would usually shut me up.

She discovered that more time with her seemed to quelch my desire to misbehave. For some reason I didn't find it quite so funny anymore when I had to hang out with my teacher. So soon she and I were spending every moment of the day together. When it was her turn for recess duty, she assigned me to jump rope duty, which meant she and I had to stand outside and monitor the jump rope use, together, so she could keep an eye on me. If it was too icy outside for jump rope, I spent some quality time behind the line, against the wall, where the kids in trouble were sentenced, and where the recess duty teacher stood to survey the playground area. I would notice her lurking about while I joined in a game of four square or tetherball. I soon noticed that she was participating in these activities, too. Not just watching me, but joining in with the kids. She definitely looked silly trying to jump rope, but she was having a great time.

When we had a book to read as a class, but there weren't enough copies for every student to have their own book, Mrs. Pardue assigned partners to share a book. Lucky for me, we had an odd number of students in that class, and she always volunteered me to share with her. Maybe this is why I read through The Westing Game so quickly, and figured out the ending before everyone else. The sooner we finished the book, the less time I had to spend with the teacher. Plus, she made a big deal about my accomplishment of solving the mystery of such a grown-up book. My name looked good in chalk on the blackboard for all to see, especially for an occassion other than the usual having my name on the board with a series of checks beside it proclaiming how much trouble I was in.

The rumor around the fifth grade was that Mrs. Pardue would cry if the class stared directly at her, without talking, and without shifting our gaze. Of course, we tried that as a class on many occassions, usually organized by me, but we never got anything more than nervous chatter from her, and more worksheet assignments. There was something very sad about Mrs. Pardue, and her quirkiness didn't help her situation much with us.

I remember the day we watched the Color Filmstrip, a filmstrip about all the colors. Boring beyond boring. But the class was entertained when Mrs. Pardue stopped the filmstrip at the color 'brown' and went off on a lovely tangent about how her favorite color was brown. She absolutely lit up as she talked about her favorite things regarding the color brown. It was obvious 'brown' was a source of great joy for her. We knew we had an oddball teacher at this point, because no one's favorite color was brown. It was after this that I noticed Mrs. Pardue always wore variations of brown- skirts, pants, shirts, and those SAS 'teacher' shoes, always in a shade of brown. Brown, with accents of handprint-shaped chalk dust from her fingers after writing on the chalkboard all day.

Her favorite saying was, "Well, put that in your pipe and smoke it," after which she would immediately catch herself and tell us not to smoke anything, and then she'd ask us to forget she said that. She'd ramble on for a minute about how we could put stuff in a pipe, but not smoke it, but really we shouldn't have a pipe so we should not do anything with a pipe, or smoking. Always with a giggle of embarrassment, and a twinkle of humor in her eye, tickled with herself for making the comment and forgetting not to say it every single time. She said that phrase often, and always went through the same retraction afterwards. Fortunately, most of us managed to graduate the fifth grade without a major smoking addiction.

Spending a year with Mrs. Pardue, we never heard much, if anything about a Mr. Pardue. Thinking about many of her quirks, like the sleeping bag in her car, or the suitcase in her classroom, I wonder now if there wasn't something sad going on there with her home life. Leave it to an attention-starved kid to see these things as quirks, and rally fellow students around opportunities to point them out and laugh. But if Mrs. Pardue knew of her status as a major joke in the classroom, she never let on that she knew.

I moved on to junior highschool, but a couple of years after I left Mrs. Pardue's classroom, my sister was lucky enough to get Mrs. Pardue as her fifth grade teacher. Lucky because as soon as Mrs. Pardue recognized the last name, she already had a very special seat picked for my sister, thanks to her troublemaking big sister.

I don't think that as a fifth grader I would have ever been thoughtful enough, or mature enough to recognize what I saw as weird were maybe potential hardships that Mrs. Pardue may have been going through. Or that maybe Mrs. Pardue was the way she was because she enjoyed the things that made her a little different or a little odd. I definitely didn't see her 'punishments' for me as anything good at the time.

But now being a little older and wiser, I have to say Mrs. Pardue is the first teacher that comes to mind when I think back over teachers throughout my school career. She definitely left an impression. And I have to be thankful for the time she took with me, recognizing my 'need' for extra work, or my 'ability' to share a book with the adult in the classroom, rather than with the other kids. She celebrated my victories, like when I solved The Westing Game first, even though I drove her crazy complaining about having to share the book with her because my friends made fun of both of us throughout the time spent with that book. She trusted me with jump rope duty. She recognized my strengths, and she encouraged me to channel my behavior into something useful, all without me realizing it. I don't think it was coincidence that she encouraged me to tryout for several of the fifth grade school plays. When I won several lead roles I discovered another thing that I did well and enjoyed, and the results of paying attention to direction and performing well also happened to come with positive attention as a reward.

She never once sent me to the principal's office, or called my parents, even though the threat was always looming. Even after Parent-Teacher nights, my parents came home with positive comments from Mrs. Pardue, as though she kept the bumps I created in the classroom as just our little secret. It became a relationship of me knowing how far to push before I got into real trouble, her recognizing that I needed a bit more creative 'attention', and knowing how to handle me to somehow pull me through the fifth grade with good grades, good report cards, new creative outlets, and with the beginnings of one of my now finer qualities, a sense of humor.

I laughed a lot in that class, but I don't think it was so much at Mrs. Pardue, as it was because of her.

Thank you, Mrs. Pardue. Every time I wear brown, I smile at what a great color it is.

C.T.