Mrs. Armentrout
By Adam Lovingood
Copyright 2002

I grew a foot within the space of a year. I was the epitome of the tall, thin, awkward, freshly minted teenager. I had bad skin and worse hair. I was painfully shy because we never lived in one place long enough to present a familiar environment within which to develop proper social skills.

At the age of 14, I remember walking into the newest of all the new schools I had encountered over the years. I stared at the floor and offered required information only. What had been intense fear at the age of six had by then metamorphosed into ever-present dread, plain and simple.

Prior to the eighth grade, learning to me had always been like an involuntary response to stimulus. You are presented with previously unknown material and you absorb it, completely and effortlessly like the sponges to which we compare the very young. Teachers and other authority figures said I was gifted and bright, but I had no concept of what that meant. Learning was neither exciting nor challenging; it merely was.

It was at this inauspicious point in my life that I found eighth-grade History and English with Mrs. Armentrout. I have no idea how old she was then. She was at that older-teacher-indeterminate-age that could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, the age range into which adolescents, fairly or not, dump all their teachers. Beneath a halo of graying hair, she tended to cloak her four-foot-eleven-inch frame in a rainbow of polyester pant-suits and flower- or stripe-print silk blouses adorned with neck bows. She stood upon low-heeled pumps that are generally the platform of ladies in later life and called the roll while surveying us through prescription lenses.

I could walk into her classroom and leave behind the taunts and epithets and fulmination of junior high school life reserved for those who did not quite fit in. In her class, I was no longer the object of derision but a cherished partner in an education waltz.

Sitting in her classroom during a lecture, I was enthralled with tales of Cicero-inspired revolutionaries, rebellion and rebirth. Her towering presence belying her short stature as she led us on journeys beyond ourselves. Although she had probably told the same stories hundreds of times, it all seemed as fresh and spontaneous as if it were the first. I felt as if Mrs. Armentrout and I were the only souls in the room; she was speaking directly to me as I responded to every nuance of every story silently but enthusiastically with head nods and smiles enigmatic to my fellow travelers. Oblivious to the sounds of restless shifting and the heavy haze of ennui, I fell in love with knowledge.

I embraced her teachings with my whole body. As she related the socio-economic ramifications of the Stamp Act, I literally sat on the edge of my seat. When she challenged us with the diagramming of ever more complex sentences, I was breathless. She would scour the room looking for a respondent to a question knowing that my hand was raised on the end of an unnaturally long fourteen-year-old arm. Looking hopefully for someone else - but finding no one - she would turn to me.

Mrs. Armentrout was my beacon in the obscuring fog of adolescence, and I suspect that I was hers in the dense mists of apathy. I shared my class with thirty other students. Thirty bored, listless, distracted, dispassionate other students. What courage it must have taken for her to get up every day in front of such a group - whose names changed over the years but whose spirit remained constant - and try to teach it something it didn't realize it needed to know.

I've thought of her many times over the years. When did she retire - for I was sure she was no longer teaching. Is she still alive? As I learned too late, she lives on only in the memories of her family, friends and at least one former student. I would have liked to have told her that her efforts were not in vain. Some of the seeds she sowed did land in fertile ground.