The Favorite Teacher

THE FAVORITE TEACHER         

I say, the favorite teacher because she was the favorite teacher on the island of Newcastle.  I am sure she has past students all over the world who had Miss Maud as their primary teacher. She also was the only teacher.

Miss Maude Trefethern was a strict teacher and held parents accountable for getting their child or children to school before the church bell rang. She didn’t allow lateness because it wasn’t fair to the children who were on time…the same for being absent. 

If you weren’t half dead or had a communicable disease, you’d have to catch up on your own.  Sometimes, she let students come in after school, if she had nothing else to do. I only remember one time when she let someone off and that was when a boy fell off a fishing boat and broke his leg. Needless to say, there were very few unaccountable absences.

Miss Maude was quite intuitive and figured out each child based on his or her own merits.  She knew who needed extra help and kept those after school for tutoring.  I was one of them that needed lots of help in arithmetic.  I could not put it together to make sense.  She’d sit with me in front of the blackboard for an hour or more.  I “got” addition and subtraction because I had fingers and toes, but not multiplication tables.  She never berated me or got mad; I don’t think she even got frustrated.  Miss Maud tried to tutor me for almost two years, and I learned a lot from her…but not arithmetic.

There must be hundreds of stories that could be told about Miss Maud because when they built the new school in the last decade, it was named Miss Maud Trefethern Primary School. 

Connie Campbell is a longtime student in Ariele’s Thursday ZOOM writing class and a longtime Washington resident and a longtime good writer and all-around funny gal. 😊

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