P. S. There is every likelihood that a Chaucer seminar will be formed, open to eight students majoring in English.
Dear Miss Barrett,
I am sending you to the hospital: Circulars #42 and #43 on Teacher's Welfare. Please fill out Accident Reports A and B and the forms Miss Finch is sending you under separate cover, and mail them back at once, with witness or witnesses to the accident.
Adm. Asst.
We miss you.
Jan. 5
Dear Syl—
I'm glad you're up and hobbling, and that you'll be out of the hospital soon. You looked wonderful when I saw you last week—rested and relaxed. Little wonder.
School is the usual post-holiday bedlam. One forgets, when one has been out of it for a while, the pettiness, the fever and the fret; then swiftly, in a day or two, one is sucked in again! Right now we're in the midst of final reports and entries. Once more the library is closed to the kids; once more we poke and scratch in the PRC's.
It doesn't seem possible that you may not be here next term. What can we do to lure you? Give you lunch period at noon? Classes of no more than 35? All the red pencils you can use? Extra board erasers? Your broken window fixed? No patrol assignments? Honors classes? A non-floating program?
Or could you be seduced by the new building the Board has been promising us for the last seven years? According to plans carefully drawn up and dangled before us every couple of years we are supposed to be getting: a courtyard rimmed by classrooms, with 'facilities for dining and study among shrubs,' a complete air-conditioning system, electronic devices that sound like hoot owls to signal the end of classes, two gymnasiums and an indoor swimming pool with underwater portholes for instructors to observe and instruct swimmers!
Teaching here isn't so bad. Once you accept as one of the ineluctable laws of nature that kids will continue to say 'Silas Mariner' and 'Ancient Marner' and 'between you and I' and 'mischievious,' and that the administration will continue to use phrases like 'egregious conduct' and 'ethnic background' you can go on from there.
And you can go much farther with adolescents than with college people—especially you, with your gift of generating excitement and provoking thinking, whether in a slow and stumbling kid or a quick, bright one. You've seen them open their eyes and walk out, blinking, into day. You've heard that sudden intake of breath, like a sigh, when suddenly it becomes clear and they see, they see! This is what it means to teach— and you are one of the few who can.
Come back!
The new term will be shaping up very much like the old; there will be the usual number of sabbatical and maternity leaves in February, and more than the usual number of new kids. Mary has been asked to volunteer for additional duties as grade adviser. Loomis, who's had an offer in industry at a much higher salary (and without kids), got cold feet and chose to remain in the safety of the school system. Paul has been sauntering into school in a faint vapor of alcohol. And Henrietta went and touched up her hair over the holidays: from salt and pepper to bright ginger.
I got carried away there a while back. But I feel it would be such a waste if someone like you were swept away from us.
Dear Miss Barrett,
Will you please enter final marks on the enclosed End Term Sheets for each of your students, so the substitute can transfer them to PRC's.
Will you please send to me the CC's, Service Credits, and number of times absent (excused and unexcused) and late (excused and unexcused) for each of your homeroom students.
Also, Book Blacklist of students who failed to return their books, and any moneys you have collected for the renewal of subscriptions to The Clarion and for the G.O. Field Trip.
I hope you feel better.
BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE
CITY OF NEW YORK
DEAR SIR OR MADAM:
AFTER 35 YEARS OF ACCREDITED SERVICE, OR AFTER 30 YEARS OF SERVICE IF AT LEAST 55 YEARS OF AGE AND IF THE TEACHER HAS ELECTED 55-30 COVERAGE, OR IF THE TEACHER IS NOT AT LEAST 55 YEARS OF AGE OR DID NOT ELECT 55-30 COVERAGE, AFTER 30 YEARS OF SERVICE, BUT AT A CONSIDERABLY REDUCED PENSION, A TEACHER IS ELIGIBLE FOR RETIREMENT.
Dear Miss Barrett:
Due to an unavoidable and regrettable oversight, your letter asking for a letter to Willowdale Academy has been inadvertently mislaid. I shall be pleased and happy if you plan to leave us to write a recommendation with an S rating, but
I hope and trust you will return to active duty here.
Sincerely yours,
Dear Sylvia,
Delighted to hear you're mending. Do you happen to have on you an extra key to the john? Can you mail it to me?
