31 March 2021
The only time I ever heard of Itawamba County was when Mr. Johnson made us learn the 82 counties in Mississippi and their location in his Mississippi History class (I can still recite most of them). It’s a small county in the northeastern part of the state and abuts Alabama to the east and Tishomingo County, Mississippi to the north. The 2010 census listed 23,401 residents. By far and away the largest town in the county is Fulton with a 2010 population 3, 961. The biggest claim to fame prior to the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway was Itawamba Junior College (now Itawamba Community College).
Hilda hill set me up with a job at Mantachie High School in Mantachie, Mississippi, a vast metropolis of 1,144 people. I met the county superintendent at the county courthouse in Fulton (it has a very nice town square) and he told me the name of the principal and what subjects I would be teaching.
I drove out to the school to see my classroom/laboratory and meet the principal and get my textbooks. I was going to be teaching biology, biology lab, chemistry and chemistry lab and would be asked to add physics and physics lab in the future. I then looked for a place to live in Fulton.
The county superintendent had just the place. A relative – soon to be a common refrain – had a place to rent. All I had to do was put down a deposit – 1st month and last month and cleaning fee. I had to do the cleaning. It was a house with two bedrooms, a floor furnace, kitchen, living room and a single bath. It also had an extensive back yard. Later, when I explained the state of the place before I moved in, the superintendent took off the cleaning fee from the next month’s rent.
I got Rascal and Sam back from Dad and began a delicious grind of getting up, eating breakfast, driving to Mantachie, a fourteen mile drive one way. I taught four classes/labs, one study hall and had the last period free. I spent the rest of the afternoon surveying the equipment and materials. I usually left at 6:30 pm, got home, jogged, cooked dinner, graded papers until midnight, and started all over again. I was so very happy!
The reason I liked teaching at Mantachie was because it was so easy to engage the students. They hadn’t had a proper science teacher in quite a few years. I think they had four microscopes. The students told me they were broken and hadn’t been used in years. They were actually very good quality scopes. The only problem was they had not been cleaned in about 25 years and they had no external light source. Instead they had the classic mirror attached to the bottom of the scope to get sunlight. After I spent time cleaning them, students fought to get to look through the microscopes and loved what I showed them.
Sorting out the chemicals for chemistry was another matter. Very few containers were labeled. One gallon jar with no label had a rectangular piece of material covered in white powder-like substance. I was at a loss until I took the piece out and scraped the white away. It was pure sodium metal. I can’t imagine having that large of a piece of sodium metal.
I was assigned a student helper to get the labs set up and I hadn’t had time to put the sodium back on the storeroom shelf after I properly labeled it. I walked in just in time to see the student worker about to dump the sodium metal into the sink and turn the water on. I’m afraid I scared the poor kid to death with my “STOP! Don’t do that.”
Another container I found that was labeled was a jar of picric acid. If picric acid sits for any length of time it becomes very unstable and the simple act of picking it up off a shelf can cause it to explode. I had to look up how to dispose of the acid. I was glad to get that out of the lab.
I asked the chem students from last years bio class what dissections they did. One student said they didn’t do any dissections. Another student looked at her and said “Yes we did.” “We did the earthworm, the clam, the starfish, a fish, a shark and a cat.” I was impressed. The other student said she didn’t remember any of those. Without missing a beat, the other student said “Oh, that must have been the day you missed.”
When I questioned where they got the cat for dissection, the student said one of the boys in the class brought in a stray cat. I asked how they euthanized the cat. She said “Oh, the teacher just poured acid on it.”
I had some really good students. One young girl was exceptional. She aced every test and if you ask anyone about my tests, you will know they are not easy to pass, much less ace. I asked her what she wanted to be. She replied “a nurse.” I suggested she consider going to medical school. Later, the principal got a call from her parents wanting to know why I was trying to talk their daughter out of nursing. I told the principal honestly that she had the ability to do medical school and wanted her to aim her sights a little higher.
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One of the things I had a tough time with was Mantachie allowed students to smoke on campus. They had a designated smoking area and I was, at times, called on to police the area. It was so incongruous to see middle school and high school students puffing away. I was talking about it with one of my bio students and she said – “Oh, when my daughter is hyper I give her a cigarette in the morning to calm down.” The daughter was five.
Mantachie believed in corporal punishment. One of the first things the principal issued me was a paddle. I didn’t really want to enforce paddling but eventually my hand was called. There was this one kid on the basketball team. Athlete that he was, he was a regular at smoke breaks. Anyway, he did everything he could to needle me. I finally had to paddle him. It was my first. I took him out into the hallway and had him bend over and grab his ankles (I had watched others do it so I knew this was the routine). I gave him five licks. It brought tears to his eyes. I really hated having to paddle anyone but once I did it and the kids knew I would do it, they behaved differently and better. I only had to paddle one other kid after that.
The kid who teared up improved. I decided to find out his story. I went to the office and pulled his record. There was very little entered into his permanent record but somewhere in middle school some teacher (female by the handwriting) had entered the statement “uncircumcised male.” I thought why would the school want to know that? I checked a few other permanent records and none had any similar entry. Wonder what was up with that teacher?
One day I was on my break (5th period) in the teachers’ lounge. The study hall teacher came in and asked if I could help her quiet down the study hall. I grabbed my paddle and walked back with her. I walked to the librarians desk amid the din of talking and laughing and slapped the paddle down on the desk as hard as I could and said something to the effect that the next person who uttered a word would meet me in the hallway. I must really be intimidating (students my entire teaching career have told me this) because I never had to go back after that day to quiet her study hall down.
I later gave the library my entire book collection. By that time, I had moved so many times, I was tired of having to move so many books. I probably had several hundred books. I must have doubled the holdings of Mantachie High School library.
The women’s basketball coach was a great guy and we became good friends. I would often be required to take up tickets at basketball and football games as part of my duties. For basketball games, after the game started, I would go up into the stands and watch the games. All the faculty were astounded I stayed around to watch the games. The women’s coach really appreciated me staying and cheering on his team. He asked me how much I knew about defenses. I didn’t. He taught me the basics of high school basketball defenses. Later, when I moved to Itawmaba Junior College, he would still check in on me every so often.
One night we were taking tickets at the football game. I think in the middle of the first quarter the lights in town went out. I was joking around with the women’s coach and the principal overheard. He was dead serious and said “Don’t even joke about this.” Fortunately for everyone, the lights came back on about 30 minutes later.
As Halloween approached, I asked what my students were doing. There didn’t seem to be any school event for them. I was immediately informed the mains source of entertainment was toilet papering each others’ yards.
One set of parents asked to see me after class. They were concerned about their son’s grades. I explained to them their son was very capable but he didn’t apply himself. They explained that he was interested in band and they wanted him to put his emphasis on that. I was dumbfounded. I still, to this day, don’t know what kind of career band is for a student. He had no intention on going any further. What the students didn’t know – and I didn’t at the time – was that I would see a lot of them at IJC later.
I didn’t know it but the principal at Mantachie had been getting a lot of phone calls about me. I found this out through the women’s basketball coach. I asked the principal about the calls and he said not to worry about it. The parents were concerned I was being too hard on students. The principal simply told them I was teaching them what they should have been being taught for years. The principal, about mid semester, finally called me in and told me I had to tone down my purchases for the classes. I managed to zoom through his budget for me by mid semester. He did let me order a couple of new microscopes. He really supported what I did. What I didn’t know was he and the county superintendent were at odds.
One night, I got a phone call from a “parent” who was complaining his daughter had been benched from the women’s basketball team because of her grade. When he told me the name of the student, I said I don’t know about that. I consulted my grade book and she had indeed failed the most recent grading period. He called me a liar and started screaming into the phone that he had her report card right in front of him. I thought it was my friend who coached the women’s team just trying to wind me up. He was known to do that. As it turned out, it really was the parent and he was really, really angry. The report cards were due back the next class and I looked. She had changed the grade from an “F” to a “B” because she didn’t want the father to know. I later received an apology from the Dad.
I got a call from the county superintendent at home one night. He wanted to know if I would mentor an education major who needed to practice teach. I thought it a little strange. I told the superintendent I didn’t think it would be a good idea since I was teaching on a temporary certificate at the time and I wasn’t sure the state would support such a move. He reassured me it was OK.
On the first day the practice teacher showed up, I found out he was originally from Mantachie. It then dawned on me I was training my replacement. When I called the county superintendent on it, he replied, “Fred, I think Tremont High School will be a better fit for you.” Back to Hilda Hill. She got me an interview at Itawamba Junior College.
