Free The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy Page A

hell out of my class.
    The music eventually proved a great ego-inflater. When I started bringing an influx of visitors in the spring, curious people who heard about the island and who came basically to pity, to commiserate, and to poke around, it gave me and the kids almost Satanic pleasure to flip on the record player, challenge an unsuspecting guest to a contest in classical music, then let the well-drilled students maul them. Oh, the joy. To see the misty-eyed whites who had flagellated themselves with visions of worm-eaten cretins and deprived idiots trounced in a head-on collision of wits was a banquet to be savored again and again. On the way home, riding through the green marshes, I would explain to the shell-shocked visitor that the children felt that Strauss was overrated, you know, old chap, a little too mawkish and sugary. On the other hand, they felt Brahms was not getting his due with the general public. He had written some fine stuff that had remained unknown to the common run of listeners. Those were such good and satisfying days.
    And the kids seemed genuinely to like the stuff. One morning Top Cat leapt off the bus, ran into the classroom, and informed me that “The Flight of the Bumblebee” was played on the “Andy Williams Show.” Later, in the year Lincoln and Mary reported that they heard “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”
    When I brought Leonard Bernstein’s Children’s Concert to the school, Leonard was a mild, if not overwhelming, success. His orchestra played several of the movements we had memorized and when they played these pieces, the kids would hoot and slap each other, then say. “That’s old Shy-Koski.”
    Every single film on music I could find in the county film library and every one I could order from the state department made its way into the classroom. We learned the instruments in the orchestra, then promptly forgot them. We were cocky about our music. Me, the gang, Bay Cloven, Shy-Koski, and the boys.
    Each morning, as my students filed into the class, flipping me a dutiful, lachrymose good-morning, I would turn on the radio to catch the latest news. They showed great interest in the morning news.
    â€œOh Gawd,” Lincoln would lament, “here come de mornin’ news again.”
    â€œThat man talk every mornin’ about nothin’,” Oscar would add.
    â€œAh, the joys of learning,” I would pipe in, “the tremendous interest you show in the happenings around the world is gratifying to see. The world is out there.” I gesticulated rather dramatically. “Wars are being fought, people are being killed, famines are wiping out nations, and rulers are being assassinated. We can hear it all, right here on the morning news.”
    My pre-Yamacraw theory of teaching held several sacred tenets, among these being that the teacher must always maintain an air of insanity, or of eccentricity out of control, if he is to catch and hold the attention of his students. The teacher must always be on the attack, looking for new ideas, changing worn-out tactics, and never, ever falling into patterns that lead to student ennui. Bernie and I both believed in teacher dramatics, gross posturings and frenzied excesses to get a rise out of dead-head, thought-killed students, who daily sat before us like shoed mushrooms. The master of clowns, Bernie could twist his face into a thousand contortions to get kids to laugh with or at him. Bernie would tell me, “Boy, keep them laughing. Make them laugh so damn hard and so damn loud that they don’t realize they are learning.”
    My tactics were different. I concentrated on variety as the primary method. Sweet talk, Shakespearean monologues, Marine Corps brutality, prayers—anything that could possibly inflame the imagination, even momentarily, of someone imprisoned in my classroom all day.
    â€œWe don’t like the news,” one child whispered.
    â€œTough crap, we