Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1949)

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That was the true experience of a teacher with enough sense of humor to want to share a real life absurdity with Miss Brooks' radio audience. Not all of our mail is friendly We get our share of bigoted mail from, for instance, people who find Miss Brooks' interest in Mr. Boynton slightly sinful. Other people find Miss Brooks' normal feminine interest in pretty clothes too frivolous, and yet a third group finds something sinister in Miss Brooks' camaraderie with her boy students. All I can answer to such criticism is that it must be comfortable to be a bigot. A bigot's answers are readymade, and they never change. Social usage today, to a bigot, is exactly the same as it was thirty years ago, dyna flow transmission, nylon, and jet-propulsion be hanged. Thinking, as every honest school teacher will tell you, is a hard process, requiring time, honest investigation, comparison, and the drawing of conclusions which are not weighted in any way by emotion, or the view one's grandfather held. As I have said, it is easy to be a bigot and live in a mental cement block, yet it is just one more luxury which a true teacher, an actress, or any sincere person cannot afford. Occasionally, the mail contains a redhot poker. One teacher, from a New England state, sent us ten pages of criticism which could have been bottled and sold as prussic acid. First of all, she wrote, no teacher in her right mind would address her principal in the tone Miss Brooks uses. "The relationship between these two individuals," intoned Miss Blue Stocking, "should be similar to that between an army private and a general: distant, formal, crisply respectful." I had an answer for that one, and I quote: "WHY?" The relationship between a PFC and a General has to be somewhat distant. Army discipline must be maintained. But a school principal is nothing but a teacher with executive talent added. He should be sympathizer, counsellor, aide and friend to the classroom teacher. He won't need discipline under fire from his ranks, because the only battle he is likely to fight is one of wits, and if I know anything about the current crop of youngsters, he is licked before he starts with that old army game. Nowadays a child is backward if he can't out-strategy his parents and teachers from the age of six months onward. Another complaint was that Miss Brooks seemed entirely too chummy with her students. "A teacher should rigidly maintain her position of superiority," she wrote. "She should represent an intellectual ideal, a concept of classical scholarship." I wanted to stamp my foot and shout at her. Instead, I could only comfort myself by re-reading a letter received from a high school sophomore, and I quote: "Dear Miss Brooks: We have a Brooks Club which meets every Sunday to hear your program. We get an e.l.c. (extra large charge) out of Miss Brooks, because she has taken the sting out c^f the superstition that teachers are monsters. We used to go to school with a feeling that we were entering an iron curtain country: anything might happen. Suffering from jangled nerves, we couldn't think of an answer to a question, even when we knew it. "Now that we're Brooks fans, things are different. We look at our teachers in the morning and wonder if they have been hitting the bicarbonate after a breakfast like one of those Miss Brooks has to eat, and we feel real friendly toward them. We smile, and they smile back. We think we're getting twice as much out of school as we used to in the bitten-fingernail days." That sort of thing sets me up for days. Quite often radio fans ask whether Miss Brooks is patterned after a favorite teacher of my own. Not exactly. Yet I am quick to admit that my life has been influenced by one of my teachers, so it is inevitable that sonae of her philosophy should color my radio performance. Miss Lizzie Kaiser was my English teacher during my entire four years of high school. My ambition then, as it has remained to this day, was to write solid, worthwhile fiction some day, an ambition which Miss Kaiser encouraged. Instead of requiring that I, or anjother member of her class, turn in a theme at some specified interval, she told us at the beginning of the term how much written work she expected us to accomplish by the end of the term. She pointed out the folly of waiting until the last to do the work, and suggested that whenever we were impelled to strong feeling about a situation, we turn that into (Continued on page 78) WOMAN'S FIRST RIGHT . . . THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS i\ II Listen to Carolyn Kramer's courageous struggle for security and peace of mind on "The Right To Happiness," one woman's search for a richer, more meaningful life. TUNE IN every afternoon Monday to Friday (3:45 ET] on NBC stations. If you have overcome obstacles to your own happiness, write Carolyn Kramer about it and you may win $50 Por details see the current issue of TRUE EXPERIENCES magazine. Now at newsstands.