STOP THAT, MISS BRIGGS!

Adult Education: Back to School

The internet is alternately cursed and celebrated by those yearning for a better world.

Anyone can find us, but we can find anyone.

Yes, it turned out that Miss Briggs was still around, living in another part of the country under a different last name. Online public record and social media searches made contacting her possible.

My psychologist, a doctor, and a counselor I had seen gave three contrasting recommendations – don't write her at all; do but be very general; speak up to her about everything.

Then, as I was preparing one morning to attend a conference on educational issues to write a summary of it for a progressive group's online newsletter, my scan of the news release about the gathering opened a way to "communicate" with Miss Briggs that didn't require a postage stamp.

Would you believe it, one of the participants on the conference's panel was an assistant superintendent of my childhood school district in the Midwest. After the panel discussion on weighty issues of school curriculum, I approached the gentleman, and his eyes lit up as I told him I had attended all 12 years in his fiefdom.

He was more amazed than I, explaining that he had served in that school system only three years since moving from 200 miles away. He then asked me to fill him in a little on the schools' history.

I gladly did so, and when I mentioned the name of my elementary (with a wide smile that reflected my feelings for all but one year I spent there), he told me the school would hold a public open house in a few months to mark an anniversary of its opening.

"Come on out and see your what your old elementary classrooms are like in the era of power points and i-pads!" the gentleman told me.

Of course, along with such fun and nostalgia, a covert purpose of healing made this trip a must-do -- a chance to communicate with the recalled presence of Miss Briggs in the exact place where she devastated me.

When the Saturday of the open house arrived, my long solo drive started off propelled by these combined motives, but with each mile, it was becoming more focused on 1967. By the time I entered the county, this trip was a life-changing therapeutic pilgrimage.

I had been back to the school two or three times since my childhood, but upon my arrival on this Saturday, I got my first look at the building since well before 2010. I walked across the playground, recognizing no one from the mix of decades of alums, wondering if there was the remotest possibility I would see the now septuagenarian version of the dazzling blonde Miss Briggs suddenly coming toward me, triggering who knows how big a reaction.

No, she was not among the handful of teachers from our past attending the open house, but in one classroom set aside for a video presentation of photographs over the decades, there she was, in a group picture of three or four of the school's teachers on a faculty golf team. This was the  Miss Briggs in 1967-68, the only year she taught in our community, and this was a life-sized image of the golfer/teachers. The smile, the meticulous hair, the eyes and spectacles -- worse yet, the video screen was positioned in that classroom right where the teacher stands.

I wasn't ready for this. Taking advantage of freedom of mobility unavailable to an elementary school student, I left the classroom, and walked down the hall to the gymnasium, where tables contained hard copy pictures -- one of which was of me at a school carnival in, well, that  year. My expression in that Polaroid shot was serious and vigilant -- I don't know if there was any meaning in that, but in the pic I was looking intently toward my right, as though chronicling to my future self that yes, if I look on guard about someone or something even at the carnival,  something was very wrong in the 4th grade.

I wouldn't have predicted I'd see as many as two powerful images from that school year all day at this open house. All the better that I had been inundated with them so quickly; I now realized I needed to go to my former 4th grade classroom and stand up for myself.

Walking past the spot in the gym where the August 1967 handshake had inaugurated the horrors, I took a surprisingly few (because they were now adult sized) steps down the hall, breathed deeply and entered the room. Though people had been roaming freely in and out of classrooms, often shooting selfies with camera phones, for reasons of divine intervention or just random luck, I had about 10 minutes all alone in there amid the modern azure walls designed to encourage learning in the can-do early '60s, the time the school was built. Now, if only they could talk, to corroborate my story of psychological abuse.

My objective during those minutes alone was to break the shackle of self-blame, by telling Miss Briggs -- and myself -- that the nine months of mental torture in there were about something in the teacher, not the student.

It was hard to cross back into time; blackboards were now white. More computers were mounted on the students' desks than had existed in the state in 1967. And I was two feet taller than the boy who sat in fear at one of those desks. I walked to the one situated where I remember my hair being stroked during the "puppy dog" remark. The spot also gave me the vantage point where I recall that one day I looked at the dapper blonde teacher standing on the right side of the room in a blue dress suit as I asked myself, "Why does she do this? And when will she stop?" I also vaguely recall being seated there as my hypothesis came into place that all this was arranged for my own good in a battle against shyness.

This visit was about moving on, though.

"What you did was about you -- not me!" I said in a full voice a couple of times while looking at the place near the chalk board where she typically would stand during instruction. And I began to believe it.

Being in the physical place where her strange approaches toward me happened made them seem real, no longer ethereal. Miss Briggs, too, began to take on mortal form again. Thinking back to that open house, I am aware that my healing turned a crucial corner with the trip to the classroom. Since then, my understanding that there was no proper basis for my being treated that way has gained the upper hand over the long embedded perception that I had it coming.

Wow, was going back there worth the gasoline!

Minutes after leaving the school, I telephoned a friend whom I had told about my 4th grade abuse to report these wonderful results of my return to the scene.

She was supportive as always, but she lent me even greater empathy a few weeks later after she read the draft of a letter I composed with the intent of mailing it to Miss Briggs.

The specifics in the letter's elaborate descriptions of the teacher's behavior had moved my friend to see exactly how it had harmed me and why the damage lasted.

I felt I was eminently believed and my problem taken seriously. I mailed the letter with confidence. It was no petty complaint or obsession. I knew it was the right thing to do.