Crossing Over by Ruth Irene Garrett

diversion.
    I started teaching school.
    Every morning, I’d climb into my buggy—I had to hold on tight because it would list until I was in place—and head the three miles to the one-room Shady Lane School.
    It was pretty typical for an Amish school, and similar to the one I had attended as a child. A white, wood-sided structure with a concrete foundation painted sea-blue. A little bell housing on the roof. Old, lift-top desks and chairs attached by a metal frame. A mammoth tree stump, a slide, swings, and a merry-go-round in a side yard. A ball field out back with short fences and a wood and chicken-wire backstop. A silver outdoor pump that took a dozen or so hard pushes and pulls to draw drinking water.
    I had fifteen children in my classroom, and was paid eighteen dollars a day for my efforts—or about $2.40 an hour. Minimum wage standards did not—and still do not—extend to the Amish.
    I patterned my teaching methods after a favorite instructor of mine at Centerville School. She was a robust, fun-loving woman who enjoyed children and upheld rules with a firm but compassionate touch. She was my teacher for the third through eighth grades, and she was a far cry from my first instructor.
    I will name neither here, but my first one was a skinny, bony-fingered sadist who spoke with a lisp and delighted in punishing children to extremes.
    There were a number of things that could land a student in trouble. Dropping books on the floor, because it made too much noise. Talking out of turn, because it was disrespectful. Looking or smiling at other students, because it suggested a lack of attention to the lessons. Cheating and passing notes, because what school doesn’t discourage those?
    I remember when that first teacher punished two friends of mine for passing notes by having them clean a toilet with bare hands and a rag. A brush was available, but she forbade its use.
    Other times, she would punish students by having them stand in a corner with their noses pressed against the wall. And occasionally, she would draw a circle on the chalkboard and have the errant students stand before the board with their snouts in the bull’s-eye. For ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.
    It was utterly humiliating. I know, because even though I was a good student and a respectable child, I had my fair share of discipline. Once, I remember, I made the mistake of looking too long at another pupil in class. I wound up with my back to my colleagues and my nose in the circle.
    That first teacher also dished out spankings with a wooden paddle. They were done out of sight of the rest of the class, probably after school, when she did a lot of her disciplining—just to inconvenience the accused, I suppose.
    I don’t think there was a child under her tutelage who liked the young woman, and I don’t think there was one of us who was unhappy when the second teacher came along.
    The second teacher also paddled children, but she was more yielding with her most common form of punishment: sweeping the floor during the third recess. And if you got done before the recess was over, you could go outside and join the other children.
    As it turned out, I adopted the same reasonable discipline for my students. I also carried forth with an attitude of joy and caring, and borrowed from my second teacher such activities as putting positive messages or treats in plastic eggs and hiding them around the school property.
    I even invited Ottie once to teach a Friday class in drawing, something I’d seen him do earlier when he decorated the inside of Aaron’s hymnal with an eagle or drew pictures of places he’d visited in his travels. In class, he drew horses, buggies, cowboys, and cartoon characters. He also taught the children how to construct a person’s face by drawing an egg shape, splitting it into quadrants and starting the eyes just below the center horizontal line.
    The children were enthralled by such unbridled