The Teacher Was Supreme - Fred Meshna
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Teacher Was Supreme
In the good old days, those honest days, One hundred years ago,
Our fathers from old Ipswich came, This land to reap and sow.
They found a rough and sterile soil, With forests overlaid,
And hills, that to their reverent eyes Sublimest scenes displayed.
They cleared the way, their houses built, Nor feared the savage foe,
For our fathers were a hardy race, One hundred years ago.
George M. Champney
“Song” (1-12), composed for the 1850 centennial of the Town of New Ipswich, New Hampshire
Fred Meshna
Boston is very interesting but it wasn’t real enough. Harvard Square is like a tourist attraction: there’s so much academia. You should have seen the way it was when I was teaching in Boston; teachers would evaluate themselves. Every Tuesday we would get together and one or two women would cry. Crying was a necessary outcome of these meetings: “I am not a bad person!” They’d use all these psychological words; then everyone was all lovey-dovey. Everything was “wonderful.” After two years I said, “I have to get out of here. I can’t stand this.” I used to be really appalled at the size of these Apostolic Lutheran families: some of them can’t handle it. They don’t have it all together and they’re losing it and their kids have no control and they’re crashing into my trees with cars and giving cigarettes to five-year-olds. Interesting folks. So I realized that there’s a lot more to this community than just the church.
And I talked to Mike Traffie about this. I have his son Jonathan in class. And I say keeping his 14 kids together and letting the kids grow like flowers, becoming these disciplined and intelligent individuals, has as much to do with intelligence as it does with religion. But now I’m running out of Traffies at school. Most of their kids have come through our school and I’m sad now because almost none are left. I want more. Every one of these kids is an incredible dream. Smart, but not just smart. They’re disciplined. Disciplined enough so that there was no job too complicated for them. One of the reasons I was able to get out of the physics classroom and into the shop and teach all of my physics in the shop was Jonathan Traffie. He teaches beside me. And now I’m going to be doing that a lot. His brother’s in the 11th grade and once they’re gone, I won’t have it as easy.
If I get stuck and can’t figure something out, I say, “Traffie, come here!” And he looks at it and says, “Well, put the [test] probes over here; now put them over here. Good. Now what?” He’ll troubleshoot something. And the kid is such a joy because he’s not condescending.
When you come out of the classroom and go into hands-on, your incompetence shows. A lot of teachers don’t know how their subject applies and I’m one of them. Because you go to school for theory and you don’t bring it into industry, so you don’t apply your subject and that’s a fault of public education. And so all Jonathan has ever done is apply stuff all his life. That’s something that a lot of them do. The applications are right there. I think the proportion of really exceptional people is higher in this community. Thinkers and doers: people good at getting things done. And the thinking part is what so interesting.
Back in Boston, discussions among educators were riddled with a sort of learned falseness. They practiced using certain types of words, saying things like, “I’m feeling a sense of vulnerability at the end of this meeting because there isn’t any closure: we’ve got to have closure on this!” or, “You’re projecting your inadequacies onto me!” Once you go through this system—through college—and get degrees, you learn what it is to be educated and start acting that way.
I mean, it’s fun; it’s the thought process. Some of these ideas get bounced and passed around as they filter down to the workers. And it really takes us in a direction. One of my neighbors gets very uncomfortable with the depth and direction of conversations with the conservative Finns because it always happens that you get around to the subject of coming to their church.
It’s true that they have a position and they’re ready to state it. I agree that they have a strong sense of security and it’s not a false sense, either. It has always fascinated me. These are very strong men. Mike Traffie’s hand is literally twice the size of mine and at any point he could take any man and [demonstrates crushing someone’s skull]. But he’s got this spiritual side that has made him into this gentle man who’s very, very rugged and it’s such an attractive character.
I was so appalled that these people were anti-education. That’s what I thought they were. Many of them are not. What they are is anti-formal education. Anti-dogmatic education. And the whole concept of centralized government in relation to this: it doesn’t fit with their view at all. Providing socially for other people happens through individual giving, not through state-run institutions. And that’s one of the things that Walter Aho made me realize. I said, “Walter, you’re being foolish. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. I have to make a lot of money. I won’t be able to afford to teach if I don’t make a lot of money.” He said, “No, no you don’t. We’ll take care of you in the community.”
And one day it just hit me—boom. I could live like a priest as a teacher and not worry about it. The people have all this stuff in the community. Alms—they’ve got the food—that’s what teachers should be doing. Teachers should be living with the community, listening, so they know what values to teach the kids. They should be teaching the values the parents want: then they have something because they’ve gone into the community to create their education.
Walter and I talk about teachers educating people after they’ve left school. Walter’s a lifelong learner. Many of these people are lifelong learners: they use and they think and they apply. That’s why this is the true essence of education. And I understand now what he means. When I got into this group of people, I realized there was more intellectual exercise, more philosophical discussion going on in a really interesting way than back in coffee shops and bars in Boston. You just didn’t get the pretension that went along with it: terms couched in jargon and psycho-babble. But the concepts and ideas were there.
Great observations in this post. How would schools be different today if teachers relied on parents to support them directly? It's a reminder of who you really work for...kids and families in the community.
Mrs. Katherine Shea at Central School was New Ipswich's modern day equivalent of, 'The Teacher Was Supreme' in my books. I do not think anyone who was under her tutelage will ever forget her.