Mrs. Teabody Dismisses Class

English Department and Friends May 2011

Over half of Mrs. Teabody's life was spent as part of the English Department of McConnellsburg High School among the women pictured above and today we will gather to honor our departed colleague,  Mrs. Gay Wooldridge, a teacher of inestimable influence. There was always a sense of propriety mixed with bemusement about Mrs. Wooldridge, a savvy but kind demeanor that engendered her to both the principal, Mr. Chester Creager and to the superintendent, Mr. Robert Swadley. What this meant to the rest of the English Department was  a kind of built-in respect for opinions, a "hands-off-they-know-what-they're-doing" attitude that resulted in a curriculum universally agreed upon to give MHS students the best possible skills and knowledge in a planned and well-considered sequence. The focus was on reading and writing meaning almost as many hours outside the classroom correcting/grading/evaluating student work as spent in front of the class instructing/humoring/coercing students to give their best. This is  what was in place when Mrs. Teabody joined the department and it would serve her and her colleagues well for more than three decades. 

Remembering Mrs. Wooldridge this morning is impossible to do without remembering her love for literature and for America, and following are some excerpts from some of her favorite writers with significant passages which Mrs. Teabody recalls as being her favorites, starting with Emily Dickinson and this memorable poem:

Of just as much importance was the poetry of Mr. Robert Frost and this is just a small segment of a favorite:

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.-- Robert Frost

William Cullen Bryant is not an easily accessible poet, but studying his work honed an appreciation for the art of choosing the perfect words in the perfect order

Thanatopsis

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—William Cullen Bryant

Herman Melville could challenge the most astute of students but  BILLY BUDD became the vehicle for building both faith and reason. Students will remember the shorter piece, Bartleby the Scrivener, whose oft-repeated "I prefer not to" became a catch phrase among the more reluctant of "scholars". Below a phrase that captures the impossibility of capturing the full essence of Mrs. Wooldridge:

"I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." - Herman Melville

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE looked at the war in a unique and powerful way reminding students that not everyone is a hero.

"The youth was in a little trance of astonishment. So they were at last going to fight. On the morrow, perhaps, there would be a battle, and he would be in it. For a time he was obliged to labor to make himself believe. He could not accept with assurance an omen that he was about to mingle in one of those great affairs of the earth.
He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life--of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire. In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess. But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past. He had put them as things of the bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles. There was a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever.
From his home his youthful eyes had looked upon the war in his own country with distrust. It must be some sort of a play affair. He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions."
              - Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage

Finally and appropriately, Mrs. Teabody ends this tribute to Mrs. Wooldridge with one of her favorite writers, Mark Twain. His humor was not of the bawdy, boastful ilk. No. It was the humor that appeals to the intellect, humor that calls upon the reader's best instincts and it is, finally, an accurate rendering of the famous quote so often attributed to one of America's greatest humorists:

"It has been reported that I was seriously ill--it was another man; dying--it was another man; dead--the other man again...As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported, except that I have become a foreigner. When you hear it, don't you believe it. And don't take the trouble to deny it. Merely just raise the American flag on our house in Hartford and let it talk."
- Letter to Frank E. Bliss from Samuel Clemens 11/4/1897

Doubtless when Mrs. Teabody joins her esteemed colleagues today to share a cuppa and stories about happy times spent with our inestimable, departed friend she will be too overwhelmed with emotion to say anything very articulate. Grief has a way of silencing one's tongue. So consider this Mrs. Teabody's effort to raise the American flag for Mrs. Wooldridge and let us let our memories of her do the talking.