Questions and Answers

This week I found out about the death of my favorite high school English teacher, Miss Lois Body, at age 96. I’m sure that many of us have had teachers who have made a significant difference in our lives – Miss Body (pronounced bow dee) was one of those amazing people.  I stayed in touch with her over the years visiting her whenever I’d return to Springfield and sent her copies of my GertrudeandAlice children’s stories which she seemed to enjoy.

I had Miss Body as the teacher of an Advanced Placement English class when I was a senior. The class had only five students some of whom I’ve stayed in touch with over the last forty-four years.  One of them asked that we each write a tribute essay.  Here is mine.

A TRIBUTE: MISS LOIS BODY (1914-2011)

Overall, I must say that I really didn’t like high school.  Chalk it up to the usual Holden-Caulfieldian angst, hormones or the cliquishness that was rampant even in pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter days.  Whatever, it was not a good time.

Had it not been for Miss Body and the Advanced Placement English class – five students strong: Alan, Becky  Les, Norma and me – there were not many moments of joy at Springfield High School. (I have continued to call her Miss Body, even though she was really a Ms. Body.  She was a woman, however, who did not need Ms. Steinem’s prefix to know who she was and how she got there.)

Miss Body’s classroom was reconfigured both physically and emotionally for the five of us.  Six, blonde wood desks with their share of carved graffiti hieroglyphics on the desktops were placed in a semi-circle for our daily class at 11 A.M., if I recall the schedule correctly.  Miss Body would almost always join us in the circle, very rarely going to the blackboard except to write an assignment on it.

What made the class special was that as soon as you stepped into that classroom, you felt as if you were in a safe house, away from the pushing and chatter and peer pressures of the hallway outside.  Even if you hadn’t completed your assignment for the day, you knew that Miss Body’s admonishment, though firm, would often be followed by a slight smile and humorous statement, both of which you knew meant “get down to business.”

Though the class was not a free-for-all nor structured in the independent-study format just rearing its head in both high schools and universities in the late 1960s, it was a place where ideas were freely expressed, freely accepted, and freely encouraged.  Miss Body’s lesson plans established the loose guidelines, but we were expected to run with those plans and make them our own.  “Being empowered” was not yet in vogue in that decade, but that’s what was happening among those five fortunate students.

Writing exercises might involve reviews of books that we were assigned or ones which we chose.  For one assignment I chose Henry Miller’s “banned” TROPIC OF CANCER. I don’t recall how I was even made aware of that book, but a friend somehow got it for me from the backroom of an adult bookstore!

We would read our finished essays aloud or exchange them and read them to each other followed by discussions of what worked and what didn’t work. Oh, to have the paper I wrote about Miller’s book!  Miss Body’s astute insights, cultivated over more than thirty years of teaching, invariably included her assessment of how much time each student writer had actually spent on writing his or her essay, again followed by her telling smile.

Our year together in that classroom went by too fast.

(photo courtesy of Harriett Ann (Smith) Sidoli, SHS Class of 1958)

I don’t remember our last class and maybe it’s because in reality there really was no last class.  We have all gone our various ways in the past  forty-four years experiencing the joys and tragedies that fill one’s life.

But I am certain that much of what we’ve each accomplished is rooted in what transpired in that circle of six desks with an extraordinary teacher and her all-knowing smile.

Tagged Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer, Miss Lois Body, Springfield High School Springfield Illinois