The summer between Grade 4 and entering Grade 5 was the summer I didn’t want to end. Not because I was having such a great time, but because I had found out at the end of Grade 4 that I would be going into Miss Purcell’s class.
Miss Purcell was an elderly lady nearing retirement and the word on the playground was that she had never smiled in her entire tenure at the school. She was also the strictest teacher in the school – in class, on the playground and in the halls. Miss Purcell put up with no shenanigans at all – zero tolerance.
Meanwhile I was a kid who had not yet learned to be quiet in class so I knew it was going to be a trying year with a lot of detentions (or worse) under Miss Purcell. I did well in most subjects – math, history, geography, English – but there was one area where I was really deficient – art. I had never been able to draw a picture or make a painting of anything more than some crude stick figures. And Grade 5 was the last year that Art was a part of the curriculum so it was a big part of the year’s activities. At the tender age of 10 I was already resigned to the fact that I had zero artistic ability.
The first day of Grade 5 arrived and we all were terrified as we took our desks in Miss Purcell’s Grade 5 class, where she gave a long speech about how we were going to act and she set the rules for the year. Then she handed out the list of school supplies we needed, and it was massive – it had more art supplies than I had ever seen in my life – including some things I didn’t know existed. Pastels, paints that weren’t fingerpaints, special markers and coloured pencils and no crayons!
Like all working relationships we settled in with our new teacher and she got to know us, and while she never really smiled during the school year, she would praise us when we did well and had the patience to show us where we needed to improve.
But Miss Purcell’s greatest gift was to bring out the artistic side of us! My parents were used to me bringing home drawings and paintings and other artwork but they rarely made it to the refrigerator for display because, honestly, they were pretty bad. But under Miss Purcell my parents would see my creations and suspiciously ask if I had made it myself or did the teacher help make it? They couldn’t believe that this messy kid with no artistic ability could draw or paint these pictures that they could actually tell what it was!
My time in Miss Purcell’s class left me with two lifetime lessons. One, that you can accomplish just about anything if you persevere (and have the right instruction) and more importantly, that looks can be very deceiving and we should give others the benefit of the doubt. Miss Purcell wasn’t the scary, mean old lady we thought she was. She loved her students in her own way and gave us the gift of art. I still think about her often.
