Mrs. Carswell

This isn't that far off...

Mrs. Carswell was articulate, like you'd expect an English teacher to be.  A young-ish black woman who carried with her a real air of The South.  She was tall and lanky, and favored bright-colored polyester pants with matching tops.  My strongest memory is of her in Royal Blue, but I know she ran the gamut.  She was stern but somehow likable.  She really put herself together every day and was there to teach English.  Pretty no-nonsense.  And no-nonsense pretty.

She interrupted a student once to lecture them; a lesson for the whole class.  The student mentioned that they "hated" something rather harmless and Mrs. Carswell stopped the kid right there.  "No you don't!  You dislike, you are annoyed by, you object to, but you do not HATE."  And she continued on with her lecture about the power of the word "hate."  I never forgot that.  Probably the first example I can think of when I realized words were a little more than just a way for you to get through a sentence; they have real meaning.

Later in the year we were at our desks silently toiling away at an assignment when the PA speaker came on.  Someone held the mic up to the radio and we heard that President Reagan had been shot.  One kid jumped up with his arms in the air and shouted "Yes!"  Mrs. Carswell snapped at the kid and told him to sit down.  I immediately thought of the "hate" lecture and thought she was going to unload on this kid for feigning true hate, but instead she let it go and listened intently to the PA speaker because that was obviously more important at that moment.  Still, I was pretty certain her opinion of that kid must have gone down a few notches.  

The President obviously was okay, but what I remember most about the shooting was seeing for myself exactly what Mrs. Carswell was talking about.