Chapter 6: Practice

In March ‘78, Marilyn Trainor was suddenly not a student but a teacher. She hadn’t graduated, although she could have taken her degree in English. The last requirement for the Education major was Practice Teaching. She spent the day with Mrs. Daniels, an English teacher at Urbana East High. Mrs. Daniels had two classes each in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades.

At first, Marilyn couldn’t see what use she was in the classrooms. She sat in the back, just as she had done during her observation time, while Mrs. Daniels took one class after another through a section on literature. Even the jumping frog lost much of its interest the second time through in the same day.

If her life was focused on teaching, or the hope of teaching, being a student still had its pleasures. The dean’s list at the U of I was published as an actual list, though mostly you heard that a particular person was on it. The list was by class and then alphabetically. The list for the previous quarter included:

Trainor, Andrew

Trainor, Marilyn

Marilyn got several copies and sent that page with their names circled to her parents, Andy’s father, Molly -- who was at school -- and April.

Linda, a Zate who had a position on the Daily Illini, even wrote them up in a short paragraph. She managed to mention Zeta Tau Gamma twice in the story. Marilyn sent a clipping of that story to Mom, too.

She and Andy attended the annual party that Zeta threw to honor the new actives. As the married couple present, they were minor celebrities. Half the pledges brought their dates up to introduce them to Marilyn, and to be introduced in their turn to Andy. In the sorority language the girls were her sisters; in feeling, it was almost in loco parentis.

The other upper class sisters also had dates. She noticed that Trish had invited Barry. That gave her a warm glow because Andy and she had made the introduction. Robin was with Dave, which was a surprise. She got Robin aside.

“Dave?” When they’d hosted the two of them, Dave had mentioned a girlfriend.

“He broke up with Sophia. He called me up.”

“And Warren?”

“I’m not going steady with either one of them, after all. A woman can have dates with different guys.”

“Well,” she told Andy when she got back to him, “our brief career as matchmakers seems to have panned out. I hadn’t heard about Dave.”

“Yeah, we talked after class. He wanted Robin’s phone number. Should I have told you?”

“Not necessarily.” She would have been happy to know that the meal had had some effect, but Robin, rather than Andy, should have let her know. Not living in the house cut her off from all sorts of gossip.

On the other hand, she reflected after they had returned and gone to bed, living in an apartment with Andy had benefits far more valuable than access to gossip.

Then she was suddenly a real teacher.

“Well, Marilyn,” Mrs. Daniels said one Thursday, “the next few weeks in the 10th grade will be on grammar. Why don’t you prepare a lesson plan for two weeks. Here’s the book; I’ve marked the section you’ll cover. You can start off next Monday.” Mrs. Daniels might prefer lit to grammar as much as she did. Maybe she had just wanted Marilyn and the class to get used to each other first. Maybe she believed in throwing the new teacher in the deep end of the pool to see if she could swim.

She spent most of her free time preparing the lesson plan. Andy cooperated, eating leftover chili for lunches all week, and only kissing her after she’d got up from her books. Then Monday morning came. She wrote the first sentence to correct on the board.

“Mrs. Trainor,” Dave asked, “why do we study this stuff anyway?”

“Well, Dave, is that a question because you want to know why? Or is it because you don’t know how to correct this sentence?” The class stirred. “Because, if you answer my question, I’ll answer yours.” Dave was no more proficient in grammar than he had been in literature. “Who does know?” There were several hands. “Martha!” She’d have to be careful about Martha. Otherwise she’d find herself teaching only one student. On the other hand, she wanted the right answer to start off the session.

“It should be, ‘He gave the present to George and me.’ To is a preposition, and the object of a preposition is in the objective case.”

“Very good.”

“And, Mrs. Trainor, since I did answer your question, will you answer mine? Why do we study this stuff, anyway?” Marilyn glanced back at Mrs. Daniels, who shrugged. She sang what she could remember of Waltzing Matilda.

“That’s a fun song, and many of you have had the terms explained to you.” If they hadn’t, tough luck. “But you’d have a hard time holding a discussion with some Australian who talked that way.

“Well, there is standard English, and there is non-standard English -- dialect or slang. Really, though, there is one standard English, but there are hundreds of dialects, hundreds of slangs. It would be convenient if everybody else spoke their own dialect and also learned mine. They don’t. They speak their own dialect and also learn standard English.

“So, if you want to communicate with people who didn’t grow up around here, you have to use standard English. You can be absolutely sure that President Carter grew up speaking a slang. If he still used it, you wouldn’t be able to understand what he was saying. Sometimes, I know, it’s a little hard now, but that’s just an accent.

“So if you want to be president, to have the chance to be president, you have to be able to speak standard English. And, if you want to understand the president when he speaks, you have to understand standard English. But it’s not only that. We’re close to the University Campus here; I drive back and forth every day. And many of those professors come from other parts of the country, some from other countries. They don’t speak your slang, but they do speak standard English. So, simply to pump gas, you have to be able to communicate in standard English.” Then for the girls. “And secretaries have it worse. One of their jobs is to put what the boss says into standard English when they take dictation.

“And, since that’s necessary for so much of what people do, employers want somebody who can speak standard English. Maybe you’ll apply for a job where it isn’t necessary, but your boss would rather hire somebody he could promote -- and the higher positions might well involve understanding standard English.

“You’ll say it isn’t really that bad, and it isn’t. There are two reasons. In the first place, people do move around, and -- even if you don’t meet people from other sections of the country -- you hear movies, television, and radio which include dialects from elsewhere in the country and often from England. The other is that the adults whom you hear speak your dialect have, themselves, been educated in standard English. The way your parents talk is partly the way their parents talked and partly the way they learned in school, and the way your grandparents talked to your parents was partly the way your great-grandparents talked to them and partly the way they learned in school.

“But the two most immediate reasons for learning English grammar are, one, you are going to be graded on what you learn of English grammar, and, two, I am going to be graded on what you learn of English grammar. So, I’ve answered your question once, and we’re not going to have that break from studying again.” They laughed, and she went on to write the next incorrect sentence on the board.

When the same question arose in the next class, she said, “The same kids who told you that I wandered down that path in the last class can -- if you’re really interested -- tell you what I said.” On her way out after the last class of the day, though, she treated a repetition of the question as honest. After all, Nancy wasn’t avoiding any class work then.

“I’m not going to do any of the stuff you talked about,” Nancy told her. “I’m going to be a simple farm wife. Why do I have to know all that stuff -- predicates and adjectives and such?”

“Well,” Marilyn told her, “you’re in 10th grade, right?” Nancy nodded. “There are two honest answers to that question. First, we -- your teachers, the school authorities, the State Board of Education -- aren’t going to allow you to make that decision this early. Maybe you’re sure that you’re not going to go anywhere, but we aren’t going to allow you to shut yourself off from the chance to go somewhere. After all, even if you have chosen the boy for whom you will be a farm wife, he hasn’t stopped growing -- mentally and emotionally. Maybe he’ll choose to go into the army. That would leave you having to deal with people from all over the country -- maybe traveling all over the country, yourself.

“The second reason is that farm wives have children. You may want to limit yourself, but do you really want to limit your future children’s future? If you have kids in 10 years’ time, they’ll graduate from high school in 28 years’ time. Who knows what the world will be like then? And, again, the people who have power over you right now will not allow you to decide that your child can’t be a lawyer, a scientist, or a doctor. So we won’t allow you to keep yourself so ignorant that your child won’t have heard standard English until he hears it from a teacher.” Nancy nodded. Marilyn figured that any girl would be unwilling to write off her child’s future.

“Is English so important then?”

“Well, yes. Standard English is the language of books. You’ll read a lot of fiction which has dialogue in slang, sometimes quite outdated slang. If you want to read nonfiction, read about the world, you’ll read about it in standard English. My husband is going into Engineering. You’d think that was as far removed from English as anything. But he reads books incessantly. While his books have a special vocabulary -- transistors, resistors, ohms, what have you -- it’s built on standard English.”

“There’s lots in life that’s not in books,” Nancy said. Marilyn doubted that there was much which somebody hadn’t put in a book. She thought of Andy’s marriage manuals. But that didn’t seem the sort of thing for a student teacher to mention to a 10th grader.

“Yeah. Books aren’t everything. They are, however, necessary for some things. You wouldn’t want to go to a doctor who hadn’t worked on real patients. Before they do, however, they have to read mounds of books. Even farmers, if they don’t learn from books themselves, learn from county agents who get their information from print. Ask one of the old farmers around here how procedures have changed in their lifetimes.”

Driving back, she remembered Jim Trainor’s abortive suggestion about counseling. Maybe dealing with Andy’s sisters had been more important practice for teaching than the class today had been. As she knew from her own high-school experience, it was damn hard to force learning into a kid who was resisting it. The real problem was to get them to want to learn. Maybe Nancy would want to learn, now. And, if so, it wouldn’t make one whit of difference to Marilyn’s practice-teaching grade. It would, however, make a difference in what Nancy took away from her time in high school.

“And how was the first day actually in front of the class?” Andy asked her when she got in. He’d looked up from his book immediately. While she put a dinner together, she told him. She’d done the recipes often enough now, that she could talk and cook at the same time. He listened without commenting. She could not yet cook and carry on a two-way conversation at the same time.

“Well,” he said when they had their food in front of them, “that’s as good an answer as any. Really, each circle has its own branch language, and standard English is the connecting trunk. Regions have their own language; professions have theirs; age groups have theirs. Look at Dad’s lame joke about impartial differential equations, and that’s analysis. Electrical engineering may be a specialty, but analysis is the whole ball of wax, a trunk of its own.”

“You think everybody should know differential equations?”

“Everybody should, at least, know the most important vocabulary of math ... and of other fields. I know what a gerund is. The wife of an EE should know what the reluctance of a circuit is.” Which she certainly didn’t know.

“Could I take a pass until I graduate?” Andy was what the kids in her classes should be. His challenge to the demand to learn something off his career path was that others learn more about his career path. They resisted learning English, and she was quite suspicious of how enthusiastic they were about learning the finer points of farming.

“Sure. Right now, we both have enough to learn.” Andy was as permissive as always. He even studied in silence while she revised her lesson plan for the next two days based on what the students had actually learned that day.

Andy had fixed priorities. The first was that she must sleep in his arms every night. What would happen if she tried to pull an all-nighter, she wasn’t eager to find out. Really, though, she didn’t have the least desire to face classes having had no sleep the night before; all-nighters weren’t all that productive even before tests.

Andy expected -- Hell! she expected -- that the sleep would be preceded by sex. When there seemed to be a good reason to skip that, Andy wouldn’t argue. So long as the exception had a reason, he didn’t try to force her. Indeed, she sometimes wished Andy were a bit more forceful about sex.

She didn’t want to be married to a rapist, but he’d been most male, and the sex had been most psychologically fulfilling, when he’d dumped her over the back of a chair and had her there. Andy would do anything sexual she asked, but he couldn’t dominate her if she asked him to. That was logically impossible.

Christine took her aside after Chapter on Sunday.

“Could I speak to you privately?”

“Sure. Come to the car.” Privacy was hard to come by in a sorority house. When they were both sitting in the front seat, Christine took a deep breath before beginning.

“Look, how did you get Andy to propose? Phil pinned me more than a year ago. We’ve been going together forever. He doesn’t look like he’s taking the next step, and we’re running out of time.”

“Andy? Honestly, nobody else is like Andy. I think, though, that lots of other couples are like us. Sure, he proposed -- kneeling on the ground, even. But that was just a formality. We were already discussing whether we would be married in June ‘77 or June ‘78. Actually, it was July ‘77, but that was others causing problems, not between the two of us. Anyway, Andy was quite clear that he wanted the marriage and didn’t care about the wedding or the engagement.

“I don’t know Phil well enough to advise you. If he really wants to be married to you, he’ll find the nerve to propose. If the thought scares him, all that mentioning it will do is scare him more.”

“Did it scare Andy?”

“Well, I never know how far to believe Andy. He keeps saying that I’m the prettiest girl on campus. He can’t really believe that! But the way he tells it, he was scared of proposing because he was scared of my saying no.”

“You’re just trying to make me jealous.”

“Not really. You have Phil, don’t you? It’s just that Phil and Andy are different.” Christine ran back to the house, and she drove home.

The church was planning another potluck. She had rather not cook for an audience more judgmental than Andy, which meant any other audience, while she was busy with practice teaching, but the other women managed, and some of them had jobs and families of young children, Susy Jefferson came up to her after service the Sunday before.

“Are you planning to bring greens again for the potluck?” She had been considering it, but...

“I haven’t anything definite planned.”

“Roy has been pushing me to bring them since you brought them the last time. Most of us, though, sort of bring the same dish every time.” The amount that had been left over suggested that two dishes of greens wouldn’t get any more takers than one had.

“Well, if you want to...” She could figure out something else. Chili?

“Actually, I don’t want to. Roy is always after me to cook them, and then he tells me that they don’t taste as good as the ones his mother made. Look, when you really like something as a teenager, it’s not going to taste as good 30 years later. But Roy will never believe that it’s his taste buds, not the cooking, which have changed. If you cook them, I don’t have to hear his bitching.”

“All right, I will.” She did, and they were appreciated again.

After the potluck, Susy came up to her again.

“Look, how about trading left-overs?” She showed a pan half-filled with chicken pieces. Her chicken had been baked.

“Well, I don’t have that much.”

“You would have more if Roy had taken something else on his third trip to the serving table. Look, I’ll take these two...” She pulled a wing and a back from her pan and put them on top of the greens. “We’ll return pans next week. Trade with me, please. I promised Roy.”