Mrs. Potschka and the Eagle Eye (Part One)

It was 1983 and I was in Grade Four.

School was a daily struggle for the young Steff. Health issues were at an all-time peak. An extended children's hospital stay would be around the corner. I was still suffering severe epileptic seizures. I was weak, sick, and often tired. But I was still a kid.

Mrs. Potschka was the hardest hard-ass in our Catholic elementary school. She wasn’t tall but she made up for that with her sheer intimidation. She had an artificial leg to replace the leg she lost as a child to polio, and, being kids, that was a freaky-assed thing to know about your teacher. A wooden stump was a rumour. One kid famously fibbed that she had the leg fashioned out of the bones of the horrible children who made her teaching life difficult. Bones tied together with a bungee cable... so that more bones could fit in later. He said she had a list of who drank the most milk and was the most bad so she was cherry-picking the good bones of bad children.

I drank my milk at home. She was a sinister Scot and she scared the shit out of me.

But I was a tough kid, and if anyone had the balls to stand up to the big, bad Mrs. Potschka, it was me. I knew that my health was making me into a pretty bad student. I thought I could do better, but having been sick all my life, who really knew, right? Well, I knew one thing: I was regularly beginning to fail assignments, and that couldn’t continue.

Yet another grammar exercise was marked and I came within a single point of passing the assignment. Knowing I knew the right answer for one of the errors, and being pissed that I’d written down the wrong one, I took my freshly marked book and scowled at it. Ah ha. Liquid Paper. I would white out the wrong answer, and put in what I knew was right. And then. Then I would challenge the old battle-ax! Problem solved. I was nothing if not creative.

Well, I put my hand up.

“Um, Mrs. Potschka, you made a mistake.”

She dubiously regarded me. “A mistake, hmm? Well, bring that over here and show me.”

So, I did. My absolutely perfectly smooth, flawless Liquid Paper application would not let me down. That much I knew. I reached her big desk, opened the book, and pointed to the now corrected sentence. “See?”

She started to chuckle slightly, then stopped. “What have I told you about my eagle eye?” she asked.

“Um. That you have one?”

“That I do!” she snapped. She held the booklet up, holding the one page out over her desklamp. “And it sees all of children’s little lies. But this is no little lie. You accused me of being wrong. You’re a blamer, and you should be ashamed of yourself! This is cheating, Ms. Cameron, and I will not tolerate it in my classroom!”

I scurried back to my desk. She continued her bellowing while I was in transit.

“Cheaters,” she said to the class. “Deserve the firmest and strictest of punishment.”

She looked over in my direction.

“You, Miss Cameron, must realize that this,” she said, holding up the original grammar exercise. “Is far too simple a task to cheat on! Cheating is always wrong, but this is worst – this is lazy cheating. And now, you must be punished. You will learn that cheating, while a short road to success, is a long road to purgatory and sin. You will atone for these sins, and you will atone for them to me."

I glanced around me. Every kid was looking at me. Would I get the strap? What in the hell was the battle-ax gonna do this time?

“Paul Bunyan is a legendary Canadian. And I want you, Steffani, to read the entire poem. And memorize it.”

A poem? Pfft! Easy! I had a good memory. I wasn’t scared. Until I saw the poem. I flipped through my anthology until I saw it. It went on and on -- page after page after page! 39 chapters.

“And you will not have a single lunch, recess, or before/after-school play period until I feel you have met the challenge with success.”

Oh, shoot! 39 chapter narrative poem?! Yeah. It was hell. Worse than that, it was a lousy poem. By that time, I'd already had some poetry books in my collection, and this, this was no Seuss. It wasn't funny, or original, or interesting. And who cared about a stupid lumberjack? I liked my trees attached to stumps anyhow!

One day, I would finally have recess again. To this day, I remember not a fucking thing about Paul Bunyan. Every single day at the end of lunch, I’d spend five minutes alone with Mrs. Potschka, reciting what I’d memorized so far that day. Finally, somewhere about ¾ of the way through the poem, about a month later, at the beginning of spring, she called me up to the desk.

“Read the rest of the poem to me -- from the book.” So, I did. Then she said, “Now get out there and play.” That was that.

Later this week, I'll tell you about my writing lessons from Mrs. Potschka, and the single best trick I've ever learned about writing, and how it was her that taught me. And then I'll tell you about how Grade Four ended and how I came to be reunited with my Evil Nemesis in Grade 6.

(And in case there's some fluke that Mrs. Potschka reads this, let it be said that she ranks among my most memorable teachers, and I was happy to have her again in Grade 6. Unlike any other teacher of mine, she's the only one that made me realize that writing and clarity were work, and hard to achieve. Wonder where she is these days?)