T h o u g h ts F r o m T h e Ma n s h e d
Of Tennis Balls and Broken-Down Sentences
By Geoff Cutler
I almost caught the damn thing, but
it glanced off my fingertips and bounced off the wall behind me. “Geoff,” he said, replacing the soft (e) in my name with its long (E) counterpart, so it came off like Gee-off, “please identify for us the subject, the verb and the object of the preposition in the following sentence.”
None of these shenanigans of his would have flown in today’s classrooms, but this was a different day. A better one, if you ask me. It was a game he played. English class. Sixth or seventh grade, I think. Class began right after recess, so he always had a couple of half-pint milk cartons on his desk, and he sucked in whole saltine crackers on his tongue like a Gila monster catching flies. The room was set up with his desk in the corner, and long tables where we sat finished a square. When school resumed in the fall, the old wooden floors shone to a high gloss and the true divided window panes gleamed. In winter, the wall-mounted steam radiators hissed and spat wet heat at us, so we sweated and took off our school blazers and hung them over the backs of our Shaker school chairs. The game was simple. He’d whip a tennis ball at you, and you caught it. Each student would get his turn, although you never knew when the ball was coming your way, and if you couldn’t catch it, or you got hit with it, you tore an English sentence apart and put it back together again. “The subject is George, the verb is drove, and the object of the preposition to is the market,” I answered, tossing the ball I’d picked up from under the table back at him. He nodded blasé approval and placed another saltine on his tongue. Now, would-be critics of his game might come up with all manner of complaint against this unorthodox method of imparting grammar into the empty heads of young English students. Not the least of which might be that this teacher could be viewed as a bully. One can just see the modern head of
school showing our English teacher to the door, or overhear today’s family lawyer’s telephone ringing off the hook. But we didn’t see it that way. True, most of us were athletic, and if we got hit by the tennis ball, it hurt a lot more getting hit playing on one of his teams. He was a three-season varsity coach. Soccer, hockey and lacrosse. On his field, you worked to win the game. Period. And when you lost, all he wanted was to have seen his whole team give it our best shot. Before you kicked a soccer ball, you ran wind sprints till you dropped. On the rink, same thing. Run and skate until we were in the best physical condition possible. Then we played. We won more games than we lost, and occasionally, we went undefeated. And at the end of each season, we had a banquet. School letters were handed out by him along with a brief description of each player’s contribution to the team. Those letters meant a lot to us, because they weren’t passed out arbitrarily, and they weren’t easily earned. No, we loved the tennis ball game. One kid, the school’s best overall athlete, caught the tennis ball almost every time. The rules were if you caught it, you didn’t have to diagram a sentence. I don’t know what that kid knows about grammar as a result, but odds are he listened pretty carefully to all the rest of us who didn’t always catch the ball. Because on the off chance he bobbled it, he needed to be able to answer the grammar question correctly. When you didn’t answer correctly, you played one-on-one with the teacher and the ball until you did. This proved to be a problem for one kid. And I admit that it made us uncomfortable that this kid for the life of him couldn’t figure out where or what the object of a preposition was in a sentence. The ball got hurled at him time and again. But an interesting thing happened. The kid didn’t piss or moan. He worked harder and eventually figured it all out, and in the process, earned an extra degree of respect from his English teacher. In fact, in that kid’s last couple of years at school, it became clear to the rest of us that he had become the teacher’s favorite. The game was tough, no question. But it was also fun, and we were motivated to learn because of it. And far from being seen as a bully, this teacher was one of the most respected men at the school. Different days. PS Geoff can be reached at geoffcutler@embarqmail.com.
PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . October 2015
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