It’s a Thursday afternoon, halfway through the school year. My 11th and 12th graders file in for English class. “Are we reading today, Ms. Kelly?” Tyler asks as he holds up his copy of “The Lovely Bones.”
We are, I tell him.
The room hushes. The students open their books and lower their heads. One by one, we circle the room; each reads a few paragraphs aloud. We make a soft chorus of papery whispers as we turn the pages in concert. They are quiet and engrossed. Their fidgety adolescent behavior is silenced by the world they hold in their hands and the whir of their imaginations.
And I think of Mrs. Permenter.
Mrs. Permenter is that teacher—the one from high school enshrined in my personal pantheon. The one whose face I still clearly recall. The one who lit a fire in my imagination and made me believe—really believe, not pretend-and-agree-with-the-teacher-just-to-get-her-out-of-my-face believe—that I mattered when I was stuck in the quicksand of adolescence and felt unworthy and invisible and confused about mostly everything.
This is a love letter to Mrs. Permenter. She was that teacher. The one with the X-ray vision who could see things in me I was not yet able to see. The one who wasn’t smarmy or joyless or preachy. The one who didn’t smell like an old lady. The one who was cool but didn’t try to be because the ones who try never really are. The one who didn’t treat me like a kid but knew I was still a child, craving attention and approval and grown-up guidance.
Mrs. Permenter had strong hands and short, dark hair flecked with grey. She wore chunky turquoise bracelets and long, flowy denim skirts. She played Simon and Garfunkel albums while we wrote in our journals. She called everybody Sunshine. The window ledge in her classroom screamed with red geraniums that always seemed to be in bloom. She clucked over those plants watering and pruning them as she talked to us about the things English teachers talk about. Which is mostly everything.
We read plays. We wrote poetry. We memorized vocabulary words. She encouraged us to scour our insides and reflect in our journals. She made language and words something magic. They felt powerful to me, and by playing with them, I could feel my own power. Language was something I could lasso, something that brought delicious, secret delight.
I’m fuzzy about the particulars, but my memory center radiates warmth when I think of her and that English class. What I do remember all these years later so strongly and so clearly is feeling that Mrs. Permenter thought I had something valuable to say. I don’t know exactly how, but she watered and coaxed me. And in her classroom I bloomed.
When I first moved to Flagstaff eight years ago, I took a job teaching high school English at Northland Prep Academy. I had been a university journalism professor for a good chunk of my professional life; high school was new terrain. For five days a week I stood in a classroom like Mrs. Permenter did, talking about books and writing and sentences and poetry and ideas and all the riches of this messy world. It’s all at your feet, I told my students. It’s all there like a glorious banquet table that unfurls into forever. Feast. Feast. With all that you are, dig in with gusto.
I got pretty worked up sometimes, and my students liked to tease me about that, but deep down I knew that they knew what I was telling them: You are worthy and gorgeous and full of promise. Find who you are and celebrate all of it.
And in those moments in my classroom, Mrs. Permenter’s illuminating spirit came forth and joined the warm, buoyant tide of goodwill from all the teachers we all have had who gave of themselves so that we might gently unfold and become who we are today.
Some of them are up in heaven, like Mrs. Permenter, in the teacher’s lounge, grading papers, trading gossip, fretting over wayward students. They continue to encourage us as they watch us try and fail and try and succeed. And bloom.
