In 1954, about to begin teaching junior high vocal music, my first real job, I was sleepless. What was I thinking − that I could just move to Los Angeles and suddenly know how to teach? What a joke! I had BA and Master’s degrees in music education. I’d done student teaching, passed the required city test. Now it was all up to me, finally.
I was a new bride, twenty two years old, Michigan born and bred. So suddenly I was going to be good at teaching a chorus and four 7th grade general music classes of 60-plus each? Exactly how was I going to manage this?
A few days before the students arrived, I drove to the school in Watts (a calmer Watts in those days, multi-racial still in 1954). The principal showed me to my room. I tiptoed in, finding chairs with attached arm desks, a grand piano, posters lining the walls. There was large storeroom between my classroom and the next, both doors wide open.
In the storeroom was Agnes Ringheim. “Welcome to Bret Harte Junior High!” she said. “Let me show you around. I teach boy’s glee and girl’s glee along with 7th grade general music.” She was much older than I, and clearly knew all one needed to know about teaching, especially music.
“How long have you been teaching here?” I asked.
“I started in 1932,” she said. I gulped. That was the year I was born! She’d been here my entire life.
She started with the basics. “When you see the F-word carved into the desks,” she said, “You can change it to “book.” Add two lines to the F and fill in the U and C to make two Os.”
They never taught that at Michigan State.
Turned out they never taught a lot of things. When I was stuck, many times a day at first, all I had to do was check with Agnes. She would find the right book, tell me who to call about which problem, how to handle various co-workers. She made me laugh, picked me up when I stumbled.
One day during my first week I said, “Agnes! I feel terrible! Taking role, I called the name Jesus Martinez, except I said ‘Jesus’ like I heard it in Sunday School all those years. He looked at me like I was really stupid, and said ‘Hay-sus!’ I said I was sorry. I told him I was from Michigan, which was something like telling him I was from Siberia. I feel so bad!”
“Well,” she said, “Once I was really unhappy with my boy’s glee. They were awful! So one day I said, ‘Let’s do this again, gentlemen, and I want to hear ALL POUR FARTS!’ Trust me, you will survive.”
In general music class we sang folk songs, one of which was “Old Black Joe,” to me a lovely, sensitive spiritual. When I was in 4th grade at Bailey Elementary School in East Lansing, it was a class favorite. I didn’t know that in 1954 it was not okay to use the word “black.” Several kids pointed this out in no uncertain terms and that was the end of Joe, at least in my classroom.
That spring Agnes and I shepherded about 50 students on a bus to see the Rimsky Korsakov opera le Coq d’Or – the Golden Cockerel, at the Los Angeles Music Center. The trip required almost non-stop counting to be sure no one was left behind. On the return trip we asked the kids if they enjoyed the opera, which we had discussed at length in class. Most were unsure of what it was about, but they loved the setting, the excitement and most of the music.
In June I left Bret Harte and Agnes for a new assignment closer to home. During my last days I realized that I had fallen in love – with the students and with Agnes. I rarely cry, so I was astounded on my last day when tears and hugs were almost nonstop.
Agnes and I remained friends until her death about ten years later. Though she was my mother’s age, we had become contemporaries, confideants. She was a strong woman, a great mentor. She taught me what really mattered in the classroom. She showed me how to love the kids.
