'Love, Ellen Treadway'
Cottle, Thomas J.
REPORT FROM CORNWALL STREET LOVE, ELLEN TREADWAY' WHAT GOOD TEACHERS TEACH An educational battle has been waging in the three-family house on Cornwall Street of Donal and Regina Stafford. The...
...The mind can withstand events like these, for it is made of endless strength...
...The moment you give birth to a child you think schools...
...Boy's going to make it," Regina Stafford said proudly...
...He knew, too, she would make an appointment to see the teacher...
...Who helps us now...
...Uncharacteristically, she never stopped smiling...
...Treadway had given him a second chance...
...He had looked in vain for Mrs...
...They argued the books were irrelevant and just plain too difficult...
...We can't do nothing about it...
...The decision was made...
...Little folks are told they got to crawl, big folks spend their money getting their children tutored for the college boards...
...THOMAS J. COTTLE Thomas J. Cottle is Lecturer on Psychology, Harvard Medical School...
...We'll forget the grade...
...One morning in late August with Leroy still uncertain where he would attend school and his mother continuing to vent such anger at the school committee that Leroy could barely speak with her, I sat in the Stafford living room drinking coffee...
...REPORT FROM CORNWALL STREET LOVE, ELLEN TREADWAY' WHAT GOOD TEACHERS TEACH An educational battle has been waging in the three-family house on Cornwall Street of Donal and Regina Stafford...
...Treadway was drawing a plan, a human blueprint...
...Treadway, and Leroy was ordered to attend the meeting...
...You lie terribly, L," she said, using his nickname to provoke him...
...Where can you live where the schools are good...
...We were together...
...but who ever dreamed that a school this size in a city big as this would suddenly just up and go way...
...Among his books are Children's Secrets: Private Lives and Public Accounts, and Voices of School...
...Treadway assuring his mother that he was intelligent and capable of doing college work...
...Treadway approaching him after the first assignment, on which he had received a D. She asked him what he thought of the readings...
...The message read: "Dear Leroy, Schools can close or be closed in your face, but they cannot close your mind...
...A friend of the Staffords, I observed them dashing around to find a new school for seventeen-year-old Leroy, and listened to Regina describe herself as a woman who had just learned she has two weeks to live...
...She turned in her small kitchen and straightened her pile of newspaper accounts of school closings, tapping the edges to get them even...
...Turn around," his mother ordered with a smile...
...He remembered, too, Mrs...
...A ragged bookmark revealed him to be about three-quarters of the way through...
...He admitted that occasionally he joined them and never revealed his true feelings about the one person who had given him a belief in his intelligence...
...There were good families, and good teachers...
...He heard outright fury as well at the crowded, raucous evening meeting with representatives of the city's school committee...
...Stafford did make an appointment with Mrs...
...She's the one going to get him through...
...Woman meddles too much in my life...
...She's always meddling in my life," he had muttered, interrupting his account...
...He dreaded the thought of trying to convince his mother that Mrs...
...Mrs...
...Bless that woman a thousand times," Regina whispered, holding the card tightly...
...Why even go through the trouble of making a home for your children, pushing your values on them...
...The politicians," he said, "took it away from us, but Mrs...
...I'm not sure a divorce wouldn't have been easier for this family...
...He felt no anger, only sadness, as if someone had died...
...Doesn't the government have to support us...
...He recalled Mrs...
...Everything we worked to achieve, knocked out in one punch...
...That school was hardly fine, but it was ours...
...Count on that as I count on you...
...His immediate reaction, he recalled, was relief, followed at once by dread...
...She says she knows she does but she still don't stop it...
...Now we're all by ourselves again...
...We watched Leroy leave the room, using the excuse that he had to blow his nose...
...When this was done, she carefully tucked them into the pages of a hard cover copy of Huckleberry Finn...
...Around Thanksgiving, the year before, he had told me how at first the students resented having to read George Orwell's Animal Farm and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn...
...All the families, all the students, like his mother, remained silently indebted...
...The big against the little...
...Leroy would not see Mrs...
...Promises me every day to stop, but she never does...
...No one's going to change their minds...
...He told her he enjoyed them...
...Treadway had just looked at him and grinned...
...Treadway gave it back...
...Love, Ellen Treadway...
...It's like we all got abandoned...
...Yes, you live where you can, you live with your own kind...
...Then he was gone...
...Leroy remembered that part of the conversation all too well...
...Treadway at the meeting, and he recalled how his friends had mocked her for her flamboyant clothes and joyous reactions to literary passages...
...Upon returning, he announced he was going to work...
...Is it always us against the world...
...Stafford remained silent...
...An aerial view revealed a seaport town with glistening blue water and handsome sailboats...
...He knew his mother would never believe him...
...Describing himself as shy, self-doubting, and an average student, Leroy Stafford felt himself somehow changing in Mrs...
...All this tax money paid and we're going out hunting for schools...
...Treadway's junior English course...
...The mail that morning had brought a postcard from Yugoslavia that had lifted everyone's spirits...
...The family was hit hard last summer when it learned that budget cuts had permanently closed several city schools, including their son's...
...He grinned at her and obediently shoved his behind in her direction...
...Treadway again...
...When the announcement came in August that his school was to be permanently closed, Leroy could not help but hear his moth-er's rage...
...He would complete high school somewhere, but without her, although he confessed to a fantasy of her being his teacher in his new school...
...I know this would insult folks, but I heard the news on television and I felt like the government had just come into my house and told me my son had been killed in a war...
...Someone has to go, and we're it...
...It is too good and too strong...
...Who's ever helped us...
...My body's hurting from it...
...When the English teacher confirmed the boy's words, Mrs...
...The following morning he described what had passed through his mind the previous night...
...She had given her gifts to several of his friends as well, he had discovered recently, and each one had reacted as Leroy had...
...Write the paper again...
...Poking out of his back pocket was a copy of Orwell's 1984...
...Sitting in the classroom in the large high school that would be shut down nine months later, Leroy recognized that his mother saw another woman succeeding her in directing his intellectual life, and perhaps his entire future as well...
...Everyone close to Regina heard it...
...For once, he reported, nobody was arguing, nobody was complaining or directing their anger at unseen school officials...
...The names in this account have been changed.t have been changed...
...Schools won't but he will...
...There have to be sure things in life...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 16
