bomb'. I hope this makes you feel better in the hospital.)
1. How You Helped Me
A. Apreciation of Life
1. The Road Taken
a. (choice)
2. Julius Ceaser
a. (was Brutus right?)
3. Spelling (Improved 99%)
4. Browning (a man reaching high)
5. Letters of the alphabet put together make up all lit.
B. I often think of these problems
2. Merry Xmas!
You helped me with better knowlege also respect. You gave me a push to take out a Librarry Card and get more meanings from my readings. You have been as wonderful as my own mother to me and I loved my mother very much while she was here. I guess I love you just about the same. You are the neatest teacher in the school.
Don't think me unscrupulous but I feel towards you like a friend. You tried to make even Shakesp. understandable. Also I dress more conservitive, I wear my eyelashes only on dates now.
Maybe it's none of my bussiness but you are young and I hope you don't make teaching a profession. I would like to see you married soon so you would take care of your husband and children, teaching takes everything out of your life. If you stay home and raise a familly you will be very happy and you will see your husband quite often.
A hospitle teaches you a good lesson. Only it's worst for the color people. Like today I was marked late even if it's almost Xmas. Is that fair? No mater what I do I'm always the last one, I'm next to the last one to sign this sheet.
If you read this and I hope you do you will know I'm crazy about you and if I ever did anything to show the opposite I'm sorry. It may surprize you because I kept quiet and never even wrote in the Suggestion Box but I want you to know more than anything how I think you're the most beautiful person I ever met as a teacher. I have to leave you to find a job next term but maybe I’ll catch a glimmer of you sometimes as I don't live too far away, having looked up where you live.
55. A for Effort
December 24
Dear Ellen,
It is Xmas Eve and here I lie, with my elevated plaster foot partly obstructing the funereal flower arrangement from the Teachers' Interest Committee on the hospital bureau in front of me, and papers piled up on the bed. Papers from the Board (which still doesn't know my sex); from Willowdale; from my colleagues; from Finch; from McHabe; Accident Reports; Absence Refund slips; End of Term sheets—papers to fill out, papers to check off, papers to sign, papers to countersign, papers to notarize, papers to mail and papers to file.
I feel quite at home.
The hospital allows it semi-private patients two visitors a day. Bea has been in and out. McHabe was here for a few uneasy moments to pay a duty call. He kept looking at his watch and waiting for the dismissal bell, I think. Paul came with a clever parody of Ezra Pound in many cantos. He's begun a new novel—about a nuclear physicist marooned on a peninsula: in Kamchatka, I believe. That's in Russia. Or maybe Asia. Each of my classes delegated one student to visit me.
My homeroom sent me a round robin of appreciation and revelation: a kid who all term signed himself 'The Hawk' turned out to be a tiny, scared-looking boy given to outbursts of enthusiasm; my 'emeny' is now my 'freind'; and I have not passed through 304 unnoticed.
My English 5 presented me with a gift on which they must have lavished much love and thought and chipped-in money. It's in such bad taste that it moved me almost to tears: a shining chrome ashtray or candy dish with glass grapes.
My English 33 SS (my super-slows, my under-achievers, my non-academics) have composed a ballad for me which they are transcribing in India ink on a special scroll and which I am to receive shortly.
Not a word from Ferone.
Thank you for your eloquent letter. I'd like to think you're right, but I have learned my limitations and my private failures. It was the idea of teaching, the idea of kids that I'd been in love with. I didn't really listen; not even when their parents, on Open School day, tried to tell me; not even when the children themselves, in their own words, said so much more than their words on paper said. Not until I had come face to face with one boy.
Bea has a way of knowing. She listens to her feelings; that's why for her it's simple. And Grayson— for him it's simple too. But I, Sylvia Barrett—what mark do I get?' 'A' for Effort.
'A man's reach should exceed his grasp' I once taught. This implies the inevitability of frustration. Not to lower my sights, not to compromise; to accept the 'challenge,' to keep fighting, to find rewards even in failure because failure is due to aiming too high; not to give up, for all the leather chairs in Willowdale.
It is too much to ask.
'Sauve qui peut,' Paul once—
I hear visitors at the door—
