Sister Mary Charles taught 6th grade English with a gusto take no prisoners attitude, especially when it came to diagraming sentences. The first hint that the daily after lunch learning session was about to turn sour, was when Sister would take chalk in hand, sweep back the sleeve of her black habit and with a distinct flourish sprawl a squeaky horizontal line across the blackboard.
As if on cue, that was the time I would raise my hand and ask permission to go to the boys room. Malingering there for as long as I thought prudent, I returned to the classroom to find that my hunch was right. Lines had been drawn with noun, verb and adjectives placed accordingly. As I guiltily, moved toward my desk, Sister Mary, knowingly, smiled and said, "Thomas, since you are already standing, you may go directly to the board and do the next sentence." With the moment of truth now at hand and nowhere to run, you either stand and deliver or fall flat on you misplaced modifiers.
With the same enthusiasm that Sister Mary Charles injected into the teaching of syntax and grammar which some of us at the time was boring, she could, with added passion, easily capture our full attention when it came to the study of prose and poetry. I always felt more at ease when we were told to open our hand-me-down green textbooks that contained verse and short stories. Sister insisted that we memorize poems so we could stand and recite them aloud. Another requirement was that we us gestures when appropriate.
I remember standing with arm raised and index finger pointing up at an imaginary flag as I spoke, "Aye, tear her tattered ensign down/ long has it waved on high." These were the opening lines of Old Ironsides by Oliver Wendell Holmes.This poem, we would learn, was about the USS Constitution a 44 gun frigate that was launched in 1797 and saw action during the War of 1812. Once doomed to be dismantled, she was saved by public fund drives to restore her. She is still afloat in Boston harbour.
Looking back over the years to when the above incidents took place, I would like to acknowledge Sister Mary Charles as the teacher who first instilled in me the love of words and an appreciation of their use in prose and poetry.Thank you Sister Mary...