Wolcott Remembrances – My Favorite Teachers

There have been a number of postings on the “You know you’re from Wolcott if …” Facebook group about the subject of one’s favorite teacher while growing up in Wolcott. I’d like to go beyond that and discuss a number of my favorite teachers – basically one in each of the major subject areas. But I’d also like to explore the reasons why I have singled them out and the most important life lesson I learned from each of them – things that impact me to this day.

English – Joseph Cistulli

Several others have mentioned Mr. Cistulli (or JC as he was often referred to). Since I was in the accelerated group in our class (WHS class of 1966!), we had the pleasure of taking not only the normal 12^th grade English Composition class, but an extra class in World Literature. And while I could add my comments to those of others who enjoyed not only his teaching, but his different foibles, it’s the content of that World Literature class that continues to impact me.

Our basic assignment for the year was to read as many books as we could from a list of 50 books by a variety of authors. Some of them were centuries old, others were of fairly recent vintage. But they were chosen to represent all the different genres of literature. I certain don’t remember all of them, but included were things like 1984 (which was quite futuristic at the time), Lord of the Flies (which had some pretty upsetting scenes), The Bald Soprano (a rather strange play, you can read a summary here http://www.shmoop.com/bald-soprano/summary.html), Endgame (another strange play where the parents live in trashcans), a biography of Queen Victoria (which was probably the most boring book I’ve ever read), and a number of others which I won’t go into here. Being the overachiever I was, I managed to locate and read all 50 of them, some of which involved ordering them through the inter-library loan program in the state as the only copy in the state was at a place like the University of Connecticut library.

Despite reading all of them, I didn’t get the highest grade on our final exam. It peeved me to no end at the time that the person next to me, Jimmy McKenna, had read practically none of them but managed to “shoot the bull” so well that he got a higher grade than I did. But I still have always appreciated the way that this class opened my eyes to so many different genres of literature that I never would have been acquainted with except for this class. Also, this was the beginning of introducing me to ways of thinking that were different than my own, so that I’ve come to appreciate other points of view – even ones that I disagree with.

History – Fred Ferris

My 10^th grade history teacher, Mr. Ferris, taught a fairly normal history class. But what impacted me, and still does, is that he introduced the class to methods of doing research. His interest in this was from his own college days at Harvard (the only Harvard graduate on the staff of our small high school in Connecticut). He had a part-time job working for one of the local radio stations. They had a program where people could call-in/write-in their oddball questions, he would get assigned many of them to research, and the next week the answers would be read on the air. His most memorable research was when someone asked, “What was the name of Paul Revere’s horse?” The answer that he gave, which I still recall, was “Nellie,” which seems like such an odd bit of trivia. (I have no idea how he arrived at this answer, and I’ve since learned that experts since then do not agree with his answer, but that’s not the point of this.)

After some preliminary information on how to do research, and where to look for answers to different subjects, his assignment for the class was in the form of a single page of questions that we needed to find the answers to. The Wolcott Library at the time was not a great place to start, as it was located in the old Center School on the green, a former one-room schoolhouse, and did not have a lot of research material. So I had my parents drop me off at the main library in Waterbury (The Silas Bronson Library – FYI, Silas was a 3^rd cousin of Anna Bronson, the mother of Amos Bronson Alcott from Wolcott) for a day of research. Note that these days, people just use things like Google for such research, but computers didn’t exist way back then and we had to use things like card catalogs, etc.

I still remember a few of the questions and the answers I found – things like “Where is the Parramatta River located?” (in Australia) “What was the Enola Gay?” (the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan in WWII), and “What day of the week did July 4, 1776 fall on?” (Thursday). There were also things like “Who said ___?” So besides the card catalog, we had to use things like the world atlas, the Farmer’s Almanac, and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

Again, the key learning was not the specifics of the above questions, but to learn not to be afraid to do “research” and how to structure your research to find the answers you need. Since my interest in genealogy is highly dependent of being able to do research, I’ve always appreciated what Mr. Ferris taught me.

Mathematics – Elizabeth Murolo

In a small high school like ours was at the time, teachers were not confined to just multiple sections of the same class, but taught multiple different classes during each day. So I was fortunate to have Mrs. Murolo three times during my five years there (8^th grade through 12^th grade) – finite math, geometry, and calculus. Mrs. Murolo left WHS at the same time as I did, having accepted a job as an instructor at Central Connecticut State College. In my yearbook she wrote, “I wish you could be my mistake finder at Central.”

That summarizes one of my key learnings from her – that it’s ok to accept correction from others, even those who are “below” you. Since math was one of my fortes, and I was pretty much a whiz at it, I was often able to see any (usually trivial) mistakes that she made when doing things on the blackboard and I would quickly point them out to her. But she didn’t mind this at all, in fact since it saved her time in undoing things at a later point in her equations, she gladly accepted my corrections. I try to carry on her legacy by accepting input from others as well.

But there were two other things I learned from her as well. The first was from her observation that there was a correlation between being left-handed and being good in math. And when she said this, I immediately looked at all the other math teachers at WHS and sure enough, all but one at the time were left-handed. There have been actual studies done on this since then that confirm her observations. Since I am rather severely right-handed and my left-hand is pretty useless sometimes, I even wondered if that put me at a disadvantage in the math field. But then I decided that it’s ok to be different. And that bit of personal observation has translated into many other areas of life since then – that it’s ok to be different.

The final learning was during my senior year. By then I finally was able to drive and my parents had given me a bit more freedom. There were several of us who used to gather from time-to-time at the Murolo house (on Boundline Road right at the intersection with Woodtick Road) in the evening. We would sit around her kitchen table, either talking or playing some board game. She was one of the few teachers who was willing to open up her personal life and interact with us outside of the classroom. I often wondered what her family thought about these evenings. But she was the consummate professional – nothing we did there crossed any lines of impropriety and being a part of this group had no bearing on what our test grades might have been. In my own life I’ve also tried to be “approachable” as needed, while still maintaining the right amount of professional distance. So I thank her for being the example that she was.

Science – Frank Ryan

While Mrs. Murolo was very open to my input during class, not all teachers were. My inclusion of Mr. Ryan here is based primarily on one incident.

I was also the outstanding student in my science classes as well as math, and my physics class under Mr. Ryan was no exception. One day he was working through a complicated formula for the class that was going to take him across the entire set of four blackboard sections in the front of the room. While doing so, his back was to the class as he wrote out the various stages of the formula. On the second board, he had made a relatively simple mistake in going from one stage of the problem to the next. I immediately noticed it and tried to get his attention. But he kept working his way across and by the fourth board the formula was obviously not going to resolve the way that it needed to.

As a result, he was getting frustrated. But I was continuing my effort to get his attention, raising my hand and calling out, “Mr. Ryan, Mr. Ryan”. But he was still focused on the problem in front of him on the board and in his mind I was a distraction. Finally, just as the class was ending, he turned around, pointed somewhat angrily at me and said, “Mr. Russell, I will see you after class!” The whole class was shocked, muttering to each other, “Alan got in trouble!” The bell then rang and the rest of the class left the room.

As instructed, I stayed and met Mr. Ryan at the front of the room. He initially confronted me, asking what I was trying to do. But since I was now near the boards, I was also able to point to the simple error he had made on the second board and show him what I had been trying to bring to his attention. He recognized his error, somewhat sheepishly acknowledged that I was not being disruptive as he had thought, and let me go.

But it was his actions when the class met again the next day that truly impressed me. He took the opportunity to acknowledge his mistake and frustration from the previous class and to publically apologize to me in front of everyone. It was that ability to humble himself, and acknowledge his mistake that has remained with me all these years. He wrote on my yearbook later that year, “I’m afraid we did a poor job of challenging you.” That may be true, but not all learning is from the classroom material.

Languages – John Delaney

Unlike the maths and sciences, languages are not really my forte. As part of the college-bound group, we all had to select a foreign language. The only choices those days were Latin and French, Spanish was not added as an option until a couple of years later. I chose Latin, because at least with that language it was only reading and writing and one did not have to learn how to speak it as well. Thus began a four-year relationship with Mr. Delaney who taught all four levels of the language (grammar, Julius Caesar, Virgil, and Cicero).

I was only able to maintain a B-C average in Latin, so it was not infrequent that my C in Latin would keep me off the school honor roll, even though I had one of the highest overall averages in the school. But not being an A student in that subject does not mean that I didn’t learn anything. Latin is the basis for many other languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, and by extension English. So learning it gives a good understanding in languages in general.

The first day in Latin I, we learned a couple of vocabulary words, the very first being the word for “farmer” which is “agricola” (from which we get the English word “agriculture”). Thus, from the very beginning we learned about things like masculine/feminine nouns, singular/plural nouns, and the various tenses of verbs. That has stayed with me to today, the most recent example being a blog I wrote a few weeks ago (http://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/02/whats-in-name.html) where I discussed how masculine/feminine endings in words still impacts us in modern-day English names. I also remember struggling through Cicero whose frequent usage of abbreviated words and idioms made translation so difficult. But this has helped me as well as I interact with international students and really appreciate how it is necessary for me to avoid these same constructs in English in order to help them understand what I am saying to them.

So, my chief learning from Mr. Delaney is based on the content of his Latin classes, and how to take the difficulties I had back then and use them to help others understand me today.

Art/Music – Louis Pontecorvo

I am quite happy to admit that I am not very artistic. As I frequently say to others when I see those who are, “They have more ability in their little finger than I have in my whole body.” But for my appreciation of the artistic side of things, I have to include Mr. Pontecorvo in my list of favorite teachers.

When I started school it was in first grade at Alcott School. There were no nursery/preschools those days and the only kindergarten was a very small private one at the far end of town. Since the schools were still quite small and there was not yet a high school in town, there was also very limited art/music available. And instrumental music was non-existent.

In 1958, with the new high school being built, the school board hired an instrumental music teacher, Mr. Pontecorvo. He divided his time among the various elementary schools. Because no one owned instruments, they had a plan of “rent to buy” where the family could make payments of so much a month and at the end of the plan they would own the instrument.

Because my mother knew how to play the piano and wanted her children to have some exposure to music, my sister and I had been taking piano lessons from my aunt. But she was a hard taskmaster and I was not enjoying it at all. I was only at the point of picking out the melody one note at a time with my right hand and trying to play a chord with my left one. This instrumental plan from the school was a way for me to “escape” my aunt and I jumped at it. I chose to play the flute – perhaps because most of the boys went in for things like trumpets and drums and I wanted something different. The other flute player that first year was my classmate, Jeanne Wilson.

Lessons were held weekly by instrument, i.e. all the flutes together, in the only available space in the school – the boiler room. It sometimes got pretty toasty during the winter months. But this exposure led to my love of music and I continued to play the flute through high school (where the band wore gray flannel trousers and scarlet blazers (school colors), even when marching in the annual Memorial Day parade), then through college as well. I only gave up playing when a jaw operation injured the nerves on one side of my lips and I could no longer play properly.

So thanks to Mr. Pontecorvo for starting me off on that instrument and turning my dislike of piano lessons into a love for music which has stayed with me since then.

Elementary – Miss Chandler

There are two others I want to recognize for their contributions that helped make me what I am today. One is my first grade teacher, Miss Chandler. It was her first, and only, year of teaching as the summer after that year she got married and moved out of state. I don’t remember her first name –what first grade student does – although I suppose it’s written on my first grade report card. And I don’t have the time to dig through my archives and find it. But that’s not important, what is important is how she impacted my education.

As I mentioned earlier, there was no preschool or kindergarten available, so first grade was the first education experience for me and my classmates from the northern half of Wolcott who went to Alcott. But I was already quite academically inclined, had taught myself to read and had been reading for a couple of years already, and was also quite gifted in arithmetic.

Miss Chandler recognized this and quickly realized that I knew everything that she was planning on teaching in first grade. She recommended that I be allowed to skip first grade and enter school directly into second grade. However, the second grade teacher, in the room right across the hall, was Mrs. Bane and she replied that she would not accept me by responding, “Just keep him in first, his classmates will catch up to him soon enough.” That turned out not to be true and I remained ahead of most of them all the way through my elementary and high school years, but there was no way that Miss Chandler could challenge the much older Mrs. Bane. Instead, she decided to do whatever seemed best to keep me challenged in first grade.

She did this in several ways. In reading, she simply gave me harder books to work with, basically on my own, while she taught the rest of the students – from the Dick, Sally, Spot reading series. In arithmetic, while she worked with the majority of the students, I took the kids who needed extra help out to the steps in the hall just outside the classroom door and drilled them with flash cards, etc. And during other times of the day she gave me extra projects to do. For example, a friend, Gary Booker (with whom I have recently gotten to know again through Facebook) was the most skilled artist in the class. She was helping him by letting him do construction of the upcoming art work as an example to the others, and since I was not otherwise engaged in learning I got to work alongside him. (Gary’s talent far exceeds mine, but we worked well together with me as his assistant. As a further example of her going out of her way for the advanced students, after she had married and was in Massachusetts she became aware of an art competition and sent Gary a personal letter asking if he was interested in entering the competition. Gary still has that letter! He recently wrote of it, “I never did enter that contest and I never wrote back to her because she broke my heart by going off and marrying that David guy. Didn't she know I loved her?”)

Also, for the class little play which we put on for the parents, The Little Red Hen, I was the narrator since I was the only one who could read at that level. In all these ways she kept me involved, interested, and engendered in me a continued love of learning, even though the rest of the class was doing things that I already knew.

Honorable Mention – Robert Carroll

My final remembrance is of Mr. Carroll. I first encountered him in September of 1960. He was a newly graduated, single, crew-cut fellow from Fairfield University who had just been hired by the Wolcott Board of Education. His first assignment was teaching the 7^th grade class at Alcott. But like Mrs. Murolo above, this was only my first encounter. He was ambitious and was going to be climbing the ladder – to the high school, then to assistant principal and beyond. So I had him again for 9^th grade Civics, and a final time in 12^th grade Contemporary Issues. I learned different life lessons through each encounter.

In 7^th grade, he decided to organize a debate team. None of the students had ever done that before, but six of us got selected and he began working with us. The national debate team topic that year (at the university level) was about disarmament. Three of us worked on each side of the issue and debated each other on several occasions. I was not only on the side that had less popular support, but the captain of the other team was Neil Hart who was a quite gifted orator. So I was usually on the “losing” side. But that didn’t matter, it was the experience that counted. The highlight of the debate team was when he organized a trip for us to see the debate between the University of Vermont and the US Military Academy (West Point). We got a tour of West Point, got to eat supper in the cadet dining room, then went to a classroom to watch these university students and cadets debate the same topic that we had been working on that year. A memorable experience!

However, I was not a “fan” of Mr. Carroll’s teaching style at the time. And when I had him again in 9^th grade I “rebelled”. I stopped doing the assignments and my grades suffered. After meeting with him during the first parent’s night, my parents talked to me about this and convinced me that I needed to do the work anyway – not because Mr. Carroll wanted me to, but because I needed to show him that I could do it even if I didn’t like him. So this lesson was from my parents, but was because of Mr. Carroll.

By 12^th grade, I was ok with having him again. But he did something rather interesting that year. He would start each class with the appropriate topic for the day, but then let the class begin discussing it and if they got side-tracked he would let us continue but with one caveat. That caveat was that he could stop us at any time, point to any person in the class, and if they could tell him what the original topic was and how we had gotten from that topic to what we were now discussing that we could continue. But if that person could not, then he got to take us back to the original topic. What a great way of teaching that was. The entire class had to remain involved as even one person not paying attention could result in us having to go back to the original (and usually less interesting) topic (and thereby risking the dirty looks from everyone else). So we discussed a lot of interesting subjects that year, but everything was learned in context of how those subjects were related.

Mr. Carroll was a liberal Democrat, and I was (following in my father’s footsteps) a conservative Republican. So we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. But I learned from him nonetheless.

In Memoriam

Sadly, many of the individuals mentioned above are no longer with us. But most of them lived quite long lives. For any who are interested, here are their obituaries:

Frederick Ferris – 1917-2015 (97) – http://www.berginfuneralhome.com/tributes/Frederick-Ferris

Francis J Ryan – 1916-2008 (92) – http://archives.rep-am.com/2008/11/21/francis-j-ryan-retired-wolcott-teacher/

John Vincent Delaney – 1913-2005 (92) – http://articles.courant.com/2005-01-06/news/0501060642_1_bristol-school-system-bristol-hospital-donor-s-choice

Louis W Pontecorvo – 1931-2015 (82) – http://archives.rep-am.com/2015/04/19/louis-w-pontecorvo/

Robert F Carroll – 1934-2006 (71) – http://www.casciac.org/bulletins/jun06.pdf