{"id":4821,"date":"2021-09-22T07:57:26","date_gmt":"2021-09-22T14:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=4821"},"modified":"2021-09-22T07:57:26","modified_gmt":"2021-09-22T14:57:26","slug":"miss-imbach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/4821","title":{"rendered":"Miss Imbach"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was one of the \u201csmart\u201d kids in my Las Lomitas elementary school classes, learned the minimal info we had to learn with ease, and when in Third Grade we started having homework, I always did mine at the last minute, often sloppily, and my teachers, until Eighth Grade, didn\u2019t require more from me because I was still \u201cahead\u201d of most of my classmates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My main teacher in Eighth Grade at La Entrada junior high was Miss Imbach. She was in her early twenties, educated at Stanford and<\/em> Harvard, and she was brilliant. Within minutes of sitting down in her classroom, I was keenly aware she was a different species than my previous teachers. She spoke to us as if we were intelligent adults and she didn\u2019t seem to care if we immediately liked her or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She taught us the art of\noutlining, and not in a cursory way. In learning to outline, we diligently practiced\ndistinguishing layers of specificity, which taught us critical thinking, among\nother things. We outlined everything, and constantly. No one-week course in\noutlining with Miss Imbach. We practiced outlining for the entire year. This\nwas also true for diagramming sentences and rewriting sentences and paragraphs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a couple weeks into\nthat school year, before<\/em> we learned\nto outline and rewrite, I turned in my first essay, most of which I\u2019d written\non the twenty-minute bus ride to school. Miss Imbach glanced at my hastily\nscrawled pages, handed them back to me and said, \u201cSee me after class.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I stood before her in\nthe empty classroom, the other kids having rushed out for recess, she said,\n\u201cExplain, please.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cExplain\u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She gazed at me\nsteadfastly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s what I wrote,\u201d I said\nstupidly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ll give you another day\nto write it again. We both know you can do better than this. I want to see your\nrough draft and second draft and third draft.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was in shock. I\u2019d never re<\/em>written anything. I had no concept of\nsecond drafts, let alone third drafts. In fact, I had no concept of taking time\nto write any<\/em>thing. I always just quickly\nwrote something related to what we were supposed to write about, turned in what\nI\u2019d written, and gotten an A or a B.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus at the age of twelve,\nfor the first time in my life, I sat down to thoughtfully write a few pages\nabout something, I don\u2019t remember what, and when I\u2019d written those pages, I\nread them, which was another first for me. I was horrified. And the fact was, I\ndidn\u2019t know how<\/em> to rewrite. I had no\nexperience of rewriting, nor had any<\/em>\nteacher ever taught me how to even begin<\/em>\nto do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t dare ask my father\nfor help. He would, I knew, use this as an opportunity to prove how smart he\nwas and how stupid I was, and it never occurred to me to ask my mother. So I\nresorted to my older sister Kathy, a fastidious straight-A scholar, by then a\nsophomore in high school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She read my rough draft and\nsaid, \u201cGag me with a spoon,\u201d a popular expression of distaste in those days.\nShe showed me a few tricks, which I applied to my essay in making a second\ndraft. I read this second draft and thought it better than the first draft, but\nstill dreadful. My sister agreed, showed me how to eliminate a few obvious\nredundancies and how to say a few things more clearly, and I created a third\ndraft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This all took me hours<\/em>! I\u2019d never spent even one<\/em> hour on homework. Ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I turned in my three\ndrafts to Miss Imbach the next day, she nodded and resumed her conversation\nwith another student. What? No ticker tape parade? No trophy? No effusive thank\nyou and congratulations and an A+? Nothing. And two days later when we got our\nessays back, my grade was a C-.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To make a long story short,\nI became devoted to Miss Imbach, so much so I attended her wedding mid-year\nwhen she became Mrs. McConnell. I loved her as I have never loved another\nteacher. She taught me to write, to think, to argue cogently, and to tear\nsentences and paragraphs apart and put them back together so they became clear\nand pleasing; and we had many fabulous laughing sessions as a class, our senses\nof humor lifted by her teaching out of the potty into realms of relative\nsophistication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, high school for me,\nafter having Mrs. McConnell for my teacher, was a colossal bore and a waste of\nfour golden years. I learned nothing<\/em>\nnew in four years of Advanced English, and backslid because I could turn in\ncrap again and get A\u2019s and B\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet perhaps the most\nmiraculous thing Mrs. McConnell did for me in that life-changing year was to\npair me with Cyd Jasmin as editors of each other\u2019s writing. That is, Mrs.\nMcConnell created dyads in our English class, and when we wrote essays and\nstories we would exchange drafts with our partners who would then make editing\nsuggestions prior to our writing our final drafts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the dyads were\nannounced in class a couple months into the school year, I froze in disbelief when\nMiss Imbach said, \u201cCyd and Todd.\u201d Why disbelief? Because ever since Third Grade,\nCyd had been the king bully of our school along with a couple other brutes. I\u2019d\nnever before been in a class with Cyd, and he had never spoken to me except to\nthreaten me with bodily harm. And on a few occasions he had inflicted that harm.\nHence, I was terrified of him. Besides, I was one of the \u201csmart\u201d kids and he\ncouldn\u2019t be smart, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wrong. The first time we\ntraded papers, our autobiographies, Cyd gave me a typed twelve-page opus that\nwas so good, so sophisticated and nuanced, I felt like an idiot for giving him\nmy childish five-page summation of my comparatively silly life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could find no flaw in\nCyd\u2019s writing, and his autobiography revealed so much about him and his life, I\nunderstood why<\/em> he\u2019d become the school\nbully and chose to consort with the local toughs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I gave him back his\nautobiography the next day and effused about how good I thought it was, he\nbeamed at me and responded in a most un-Cyd-like way, saying he\u2019d really\nenjoyed my autobiography, too, and had only made a few suggestions which he\u2019d\nwritten on the last page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And for the rest of Eighth\nGrade and through high school, Cyd and I liked each other. We didn\u2019t become\ngood friends, but we were always glad to see each other, having for several\nmonths vetted each other\u2019s essays before we rewrote them for our beloved Miss\nImbach-McConnell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

fin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mystery Memory<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was one of the \u201csmart\u201d kids in my Las Lomitas elementary school classes, learned the minimal info we had to learn with ease, and when in Third Grade we started having homework, I always did mine at the last minute, often sloppily, and my teachers, until Eighth Grade, didn\u2019t require more from me because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7003,7001,7006,7004,4770,7002,6998,6999,7007],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4821"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4823,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4821\/revisions\/4823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}