She was nice enough but of course teachers can turn on you at any moment.He was sure he was in trouble. Why else would a teacher make you stay after school?
She had taught him in the first grade and now again in the second.
She had her class read out loud everyday and he had trouble following along. He watched the other kids turn pages hoping the pictures would give him a clue. When it was his turn, they had to show him where to pick up.
When they met after school, the good sister took him to a closet-sized room nobody ever used. He was terrified about what was going to happen. She showed him a hand-printed word, she underlined its suffix and told him it is pronounced “shun.”
Say it out loud. Ten times. Now remember it.
She explained that ‘do’ is ‘du’ (except when it isn’t) and ‘ph’ is ‘f’ and that ‘ed’ changes at the end of some verbs.
They would meet every Tuesday and Thursday and nobody would find out. He squirmed when she promised he was going to be one of her best readers — only girls were supposed to be the best readers.
She used marks to break down sentences and to show who was doing what to whom. She dared him to diagram a compound sentence on his own.
When summer came along he began to read his brothers’ comic books. It took an hour to work through just one story. But with the help of Scrooge McDuck he unlocked the secrets of apostrophes and contractions. That was big.
So yeah, a nun and a duck.
The boy had a new teacher in the fall, one who wore clothes that showed her arms and legs and her pretty hair. MIss Anne pulled him aside at the end their first week to tell him how impressed she was with the way he read.
That was the first year he didn’t hate being in school.
