A Woman, Sort Of, Scorned
When Shakespeare wrote, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” he didn’t have my elementary school art teacher, Miss Goldman, in mind. And, if you know the teacher with the effervescent personality that lights up a room when she walks in, the one who all the dads have secret crushes on, this wasn’t Miss Goldman, either. Why’d she feel scorned? One of her fifth-grade students had broken a pottery bowl, crafted under her watch, into dozens of pieces and left it for dead on the school playground. The target of her fury was Eric G. Schwartz.
It was just like every other day in fifth grade when Ms. Goldman knocked on our classroom door. She walked in holding playground artifacts radiocarbon dated to the evening before, and they seemed vaguely familiar. My best friend and I, in a burst of gleeful mischief, had intentionally shattered the bowl. Any reasonable adult would’ve seen this act for what it was - two twelve-year-old boys destroying a physical object, and not thinking more than 5 minutes into the future.
Surprisingly, I had done some pottery and ceramics at summer camp and made some decent stuff. However, this was not one of my better creations, and I give myself credit for recognizing this. I destroyed it to avoid devaluing my artistic reputation. If Miss Goldman were as good an art teacher as she envisioned herself, she would have realized this. I’m sure Rodin demolished his lesser works before sharing them with the public for the same reason. And even without legal representation, I knew I was the rightful owner of this clay piece and could do with it as I pleased. At most, my crime was only a misdemeanor, littering.
I would have bet my entire baseball card collection that nobody would ever gather the pieces and reconstruct them to identify the perpetrator. Miss Goldman had us etch our names on the bottom to identify the owners of these masterpieces, so once she reassembled them, she didn’t have to be Agatha Christie to catch the miscreant.
As she announced my name and used me as an example for bad behavior, she scowled. She called me to the front of the room. I don’t recall exactly what she said (it was, after all, more than 50 years ago), but I do remember the feeling of wanting to disappear as I walked up to her and I accepted the broken artifact. I was generally a well-behaved kid and a good student, so most of the time when I was called out, it was for positive accomplishments.
If this had happened in today's “everyone gets a trophy” world, she might have given me the benefit of the doubt and attributed my behavior to “self-loathing” and “acting out.” This was not the case, although I had my fair share of these incidents. I once threw a beautiful crayon drawing, created by a future Greek goddess named Nikki Papoulias, out the window of our nursery school bus, partially because I had a crush on her and partly because my drawings didn’t measure up to hers. This was just a case of my friend and I wanting to have a little fun, two pre-adolescent males' instinctual destructiveness. Or, maybe she was an environmentalist 50 years ahead of her time? Did I think the pieces would biodegrade? If so, I should have noticed the durability of the artifacts I pretended to view on our museum field trips.
Mrs. Norton, my primary fifth-grade teacher, a heavy smoker who I believe died of lung cancer, permitted this flogging. If I could time travel, I’d go back to that class, intervene and say, “Miss Goldman, this has nothing to do with you, you narcissistic witch! Perhaps teaching art to children is not the best career choice for you.”
One of my classmates, Adam Goldfarb, a pranking prodigy, was our Joan of Arc, embodying resistance to authority through art: Miss Goldman specifically told us not to put a sun in the corner in any of our drawings or paintings whenever we started a new project. She said it was trite and clichéd. And Adam, a voracious reader who did an oral book report on a title that didn’t exist just because he thought it would be fun, and with a sardonic sense of humor, made sure to put a sun in the corner before doing anything else. I’m laughing out loud thinking about him. His suns triggered her outrage every time! Thank you, Adam, for having my back and repeatedly scorning the woman who scorned me.