If you're a teacher, you've probably heard the expression 'teachable moments'. Those are times when you and your class stumble across a real-life example of something that you've been trying to teach your students. As an instructor, you pounce upon these moments with a happy 'aha!' and proceed to teach the heck out of the experience.

I don't think Mrs Todd intended April Fools' Day to be a teachable moment. But she made the best of it.

Mrs Todd was my second-grade teacher. Second-graders are 7-year-olds, Sasha. (Sasha will get this joke.) Mrs Todd was a generously-built middleaged lady who adored her pupils. She was adored in return. It was like having another grandmother, one who always knew the fun games to play.

She taught us to fingerpaint and play rhythm instruments and churn butter by shaking the raw buttermilk up and down in the Mason jar. Then she got some moms to drive us all to the commercial bakery a few streets away, where we sat and watched the bread being made on the assembly line through the big glass windows. (It was the 1950s, things like that happened.) We took the hot bread back to the classroom and smeared the slices with our own butter. Yes, yes, it was that awful white stuff that only Americans would believe deserved the name 'bread', and you couldn't do anything like that now, you'd get sued or closed down by the health department, and somebody somewhere would condemn the whole endeavour in postmodern terms of many syllables, but we loved it. And we loved Mrs Todd.

On the first day of every month, Mrs Todd would give us a little essay to copy from the blackboard so that we could practise what used to be called penmanship. Penmanship was my least favourite subject. (I haven't looked back since I learned to type, and I haven't written anything other than my scrawled, illegible signature in months, so there.) But I liked Mrs Todd's little essays about each month. They also taught composition. I could crib some of the titbits to liven up the letters we wrote to my grandmother in the hills. I needed something to say after, 'Dear Grandmother, I am fine. How are you?'

On 1 April, 1959, a Wednesday, the essay began: 'April is a warm month. It is not windy like March.' We dutifully copied the essay, with its comments on flowers and showers and spring and suchlike. Then it was time for recess.

Out on the playground, the wind was gusting lustily. It blew the girls' skirts around and scattered last year's dry leaves. We laughed and chased stray papers and errant balls. We clamoured around our teacher.

'Hey, Mrs Todd! April has played an April Fool's joke on you! It's windy today!'

She told us that 'hey is for horses,' and found the joke as good as we did. She had her teachable moment, right there.

Another century, another millennium even, and the grownups of the world are finding a few teachable moments of their own. I've just been laughing my head off at the Youtube lawyer who's made a tournament out of 'Epic Zoom Fails' by US lawyers. He had to start with the lawyer who 'appeared' in virtual court through a kitten filter. The adorable kitty is saying, 'Your Honour, I'm not a cat.' The winner, though, was the lawyer whose oral argument before the Supreme Court was punctuated by the sound of a flushing toilet. Yes, the Chief Justice's head probably did explode.

The Youtube lawyer, who is excellent, by the way, chooses to use these gaffes as teachable moments for law students. Gut so, as the Germans say. The internet has made more humans autodidacts than ever before. 'How do you do that?' is often answered by, 'There's a Youtube you can watch.' Judicious observation of inappropriate behaviour is also available – just search for 'fails' and 'instant karma' examples. So that we have 'learnable moments' to go with our teachable ones.

I am absolutely sure Mrs Todd would have been a great Youtuber. She'd probably have used the medium to allow her 'babies' to showcase their talents, and she'd have found intriguing things for us to watch. Technology would hold no terrors for the woman who took all of us 7-year-olds on a field trip to the Penal Farm. We had a blast, and so did all of those nice men who let us pet goats and milk cows.

It was not until several years later that I looked up the word 'penal' in the dictionary. Mrs Todd had sang froid.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

26.04.21 Front Page

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