*from the archive and oh maybe the early 2000s? who knows at this point, but, in increments I will share and, knock wood, you will enjoy, this old-ish story. Mildred Jensen was an actual math teacher I had in middle school, she was tall and leggy, but everything else is entirely fictional here. I really liked her, a lot, even if – at the end of her career when I had her as an instructor – she was showing not only her age but the age of some of her ideas (boys are better at measuring things, for one).
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She had always loved math, even as a child attending a rural one room school in the valley five miles walk from her parent’s farmhouse. She was, very early on in that single room, a help to their instructor Mr. Fiske, teaching the younger children all about sums, subtraction, fractions, and long division, among other subjects, for she was a bright one all around.
At home, if her father or mother was stuck, figuring out quarts and gallons against dollars and cents, feed prices and profit versus loss, Mildred would work it out, sitting at their well-worn kitchen table with her pencil flying across the page. Sometimes she knew the answers to math problems just by looking at them, by merely being told the sums, one less another or times another or even when divided by a third, but she knew that being able to show how she got there, that also counted.
Her mother and father encouraged her in this, her schoolwork, her special abilities in math, for as they well knew, farming was a hard life; her older brother wanted the farm, if he chose, as seemed likely. And, happily, Mildred wanted to teach, wanted a life that was intellectual and fine, more like the town girls in the central school she shifted to for the seventh grade, girls who looked down on her in her homespun skirts, made from her mother’s old clothes cut down to size. It was the nineteen thirties, and even if things were getting better, there was no wasting anything on the farm.
Mildred was also not a pretty girl; she said so herself and said it bluntly, ‘I’m not the kind to catch the eye of a boy, a Future Farmer of America, perhaps, or even a fellow teacher, later on’. This was not just because she was smarter than most of the boys she knew, she was also taller, just under five foot nine at thirteen years old, with endless seeming, narrowly calved legs and long skinny arms to match, coarse hair she could not control making her head, she felt, resemble the bulky end of her dad’s anvil. The trunk of her body was round and thick in contrast to her limbs, and she tilted forward, always, as if perennially walking into or against a strong wind. No, Mildred freely acknowledged, she was not pretty.
And so, she worked hard at her studies, bringing home every prize in academics she could, including a full scholarship to a local college where she would learn all she needed to be a teacher, the kind of teacher she herself loved and benefitted from at the central school: sharp-eyed spinster ladies dedicated to the craft, to the art, of bringing out the best in their pupils. She would make herself in their image, finding her true calling in educating others as she had back in elementary school, helping out – of this she was sure. It seemed not being one of the pretty, popular girls, yet knowing where one belonged and finding joy in inspiring others, might have its compensations.
The history teacher, a man, said as much to Mildred one day in her final weeks of high school, when her plans were set and shared with the rest of her classmates, ‘You’ll make fine teacher one day, Millie, a girl like you. The classroom’s where you belong.’ Mildred felt his eyes run up and down her, taking in her coarse hair, her large capable barn-chapped hands, ‘Yes, I think you’ve made a smart choice. Good luck to you.’ She saw him once that summer before college, in the town, with a woman she assumed was his wife, a pretty little thing whose head barely met his shoulder.