February 3, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
10:56 PM (Pacific)
It is odd how certain events in one's childhood...seemingly unimportant, nothing like Pearl Harbor, for example...adhere in one's mind as turning points.
One such memory I have dates back to my fifth grade classroom. At the time, I suppose the lesson I would later derive from the experience was all but lost on me. For one thing, the teacher was the least popular teacher, ever, in that school. I remember her well...Miss Wahab (way-hab, short "a").
Backtracking a bit.... I went to what was considered one of the best public elementary schools in Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1970's. I'm not sure what that means exactly. I know how to read and write, I learned how to learn in some ways...the math instruction was pretty poor. Geography was fairly nonexistent. The teachers were nice all around, some of them were clever; I felt comfortable, although at one point I also felt bored.
Miss Wahab was all-around different from the other teachers. She was enormous, intimidating, the only "Miss" female teacher back before anyone was "Ms." in the South. She wasn't an Arab despite the name. She was very white, blue-eyed, with dyed blonde hair, and she was not friendly at all. There was one kid she used to pick on for no apparent reason...he wasn't particularly disorderly, I was left with the impression that she just wanted to pick on someone...and that alone put her out of my good books.
To be fair, she was not a Southerner, and, in the South, you kind of had to be. I still don't know where she was from. England, is what I thought...but her manner was not English. Maybe South African.
Anyhow I'm getting off the point. She did try to teach us correct grammar. She was the only one who really did. I am indebted to her for that. In retrospect, she probably went home each day and smashed her head against the wall out of sheer frustration.
One day, the day of this memory, Miss Wahab wrote on the chalkboard:
alright
all right
And asked us, the class, to vote on the correct spelling.
I don't remember how far along in the school year this was. It was neither at the beginning nor at the end. The student body was already fed up with Miss Wahab, yet there was an underlying feeling of respect, that she did know stuff; she knew stuff that we didn't and would not learn anywhere else.
So we voted--and everyone, except my desk-mate at the time, raised their hand, including me, to vote for the first spelling. No one, except that desk-mate, raised his or her hand at the second spelling.
At the time I thought, how can this desk-mate raise her hand? She would clearly be humiliated; the rest of us had voted for "alright." (It was not a small class, as I say I went to public school.) It was bad enough to be the only one voting on a particular issue. So much worse if you were wrong anyway.
Miss Wahab never let on one way or the other. She asked us to repeat the vote.
Again--everyone--except that one girl--raised their hand for "alright." No one--except that girl--voted for "all right."
Dramatic pause...then Miss Wahab announced (and thinking back she must have been tempted to laugh out loud), that we were all wrong, except for the one who had picked "all right."
Ahhhhhhhhhhh! What got me...why did I think it was "alright"?
I must have seen it spelled that way, and I have since observed it with that spelling, but then I must have also seen it spelled correctly, much more often than not. I came to the conclusion...then and now...that I was convinced that "alright" was better than "all right" simply because everyone else was voting that way. I am not saying that I thought it was "all right" and I didn't have the guts to stick my hand up. I am saying that I was sure it was "alright" because I saw everyone else voting that way.
Miss Wahab was making a point, but I think her point was different from the point that makes this whole incident so vivid to me even now. Her point had to be that the bunch of us were constantly spelling it wrong and we needed to have the right spelling somehow cemented into our brains. (Which it was, at least for me.)
What makes this a turning point in my life was how many times subsequent to that fifth-grade classroom day, I have seen the exact same thing happen. There is peer pressure, which becomes social pressure, which becomes something of a mob mentality. It always brings me back to that one day when I raised my hand not because I was right, not because I had thought it over and made a decision, but because I wanted to go along with the crowd. I did not wish to raise the lone and lonely hand, against the forest of hands. I felt that the forest was right because it was a forest, rather than a tree.
It remains one of my treasured childhood memories.
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