Life Lessons From Nazi Grade School Teachers

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Life Lessons From Nazi Grade School Teachers

February 15, 2009

light bulb Not long ago, I posted a bunch of my favorite quotes. One of the most important of those was “The Professional’s Code” as spoken so well by John Carlton.

It went like this:

The “Professional’s Code” is very simple: You show up where you’re supposed to be… when you said you’d be there… having done what you said you’d do. That’s it.

This “no excuses” approach is something I’ve tried to live by my whole life. In fact, you might even say I take a perverse bit of pride in honoring it.

But what no one knows is one of the fundamental stories behind HOW this mindset began in the mind of Young Greg.

In 3rd & 4th grade I had this PE coach, Coach Morrison, who would NOT take any bullshit from us at all. He burnt the extremes of the “no excuses” lesson into our brains with an entire series of little mindfuck exercises to see who could follow his weird instructions down to a literal T.

Anyone caught messing up was verbally “tarred and feathered” in front of the whole class – a punishment which, to a youngster just learning the ropes in life, meant nothing short of terrifying nightmare.

It was one of those situations rigged against you from the beginning, where it didn’t matter what you said; any answer was automatically the WRONG answer. The smarter ones among us quickly caught on that only ‘acceptable’ thing to say was “coach, I screwed up. I have no excuse.”

One of the more poignant lessons from Coach Morrison is when he’d have us jump in place, turning 90 degrees each time as he barked “RIGHT!” “LEFT!” “RIGHT!” “RIGHT!” “RIGHT!” “LEFT!”, getting progressively faster each time, eventually reaching a dizzy crescendo.

Finally he’d yell, “STOP!”

Then he’d begin the rounds, sauntering by everyone, like a drill-sergeant inspecting his misfit troops. Usually some goof would make a mistake and you’d get off scot-free. But the time I remember most was when he marched straight up to me and peered right into my eyes.

“Oh shit,” I thought, “My day has finally come. Now I’m done for.”

He screamed, “GREG!….” His words echoing throughout the now pin-drop-quiet gym.

…

I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to say something? You could slice the silence with a knife.

At last, he moved:

“…YOU’RE RIGHT!!!!”

My hair swayed a bit from the sudden blast of air. I nearly lost all blood pressure to my head, in what felt like being mere seconds from fainting dead away on the spot.

But I looked around the room and, sure enough, was the only one facing the “right” way.

I guess everybody else just looked to see what the other guy was doing when they got confused.

Morrison was always like that; never quite knew what he was really thinking. And I bet he loved it.

(As a brief aside: On my final day of his class before I moved to a different city, Coach Morrison took me aside and said I could walk the track that day if I wanted to, instead of sweating my ass off like everyone else. Apparently I’d earned it. Guess he wasn’t such a bastard after all.)

But my relief was only a reprieve, as I left one 4th grade class and landed into another.

Enter one Mrs. Rothwell. Rose lensed glasses. Mounted animals around the classroom (I sat in between the King Cobra and gigantic Moose head.) Hunchback crazy-woman with claws instead of finger nails who would sooner eat a live rat than deal with our bullshit excuses.

Because of those weird glasses, you could never tell if she was looking at you… or the kid next to you. This made every public scolding possibly YOUR public scolding, which made everyone pay attention to every last word she said.

And you learned real quick not to test her, either. Because yesterday when the kid next to you got out of line, all Mrs. Rothwell said was:

“Ok, that’s it. You’re gone.”

She dragged him by the ear outside into the hallway, and… all you knew was you hadn’t seen him since.

No one knew what “gone” really meant. It was exact enough to create news, yet vague enough to arouse rumor.

This new school made my old one in the bigger city look like Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. The math problems might as well have been written in Egyptian, the homework piled up faster than I could possibly imagine, and during class the teacher switched from “Social Studies” to “Science” with a fluid-like invisible smoothness that left everyone wondering whether they should be looking at the frog diagram on page 98 or the Mayan pyramid on 212.

There simply wasn’t enough desk space to have 3 books open at once to cover all your bases.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Rothwell was up there at the front of the room spouting off on what the concept of “free enterprise” was at 88 miles per hour when you’d ask a question on somehting she covered 5 minutes ago (because that’s where you are)

“Don’t bother me, I’m on a roll!” she’d blurt.

Every time she said this, I’d imagine her running in place, literally atop a perpetually spinning dinner roll.

Yet for all her insanity, there was a method to her madness. In her mind, she was preparing us for the unmitigated horrors of Middle School as if we were troops about to land Omaha Beach on D-day.

And you know what? It worked. “Graduates” of her class were the finest, most disciplined group of multi-taskers the Middle School realm had ever seen.

But I’ve saved the best for last… because even if you mutated Coach Morrison and Mrs. Rothwell into some hybrid creature, you still wouldn’t begin to approach the Sterling Perfection forged in the heat of 7th grade English.

Her name was Mrs. Berkbuegler. Students feared the looming visage she cast on their schedules. Her classes ran with all the intricate precision of a Swiss watch, and a “good day” was when only one student openly wept.

Each day, she drilled us on new vocabulary, new literary terms, new grammar- sharpening our dull speech and even duller writing down to a fine tip, reaching a penetrating, diamond-like hardness by year’s end.

She drilled simile and metaphor. She taught literature, especially Shakespeare. (Every one of us literally memorized the entire play of Julius Caesar, word-for-word, and most importantly understood it.) Forms of “to be” – am, are, is, was, were, has, have, had, be, being, and been. Nouns, personification, onomatopoeia. She branded some definitions so firmly into your mind, you could easily repeat them to your children, 10, even 20 years later without batting an eye.

The speed at which you could flip through a dictionary was of utmost value, so The Good Book became your new best friend real quick… and those who got left behind were the ones who’d often stumble on the rocks in a perpetual cycle to keep up, eventually falling off the cliff (so to speak), cracking under the pressure.

Despite my initial dread and absolute hatred of her [class], I have said for years and will continue to proudly claim for the rest of my life, Mrs. Berkbuegler’s ruthless steel blade of discipline and absolute insistence on accepting nothing but one’s absolute best has served me better than any other single thing I’ve learned since.

That’s because it’s the real basis of learning anything else you need to be successful in life. Most people will agree with the fact, but few actually live as if love, fame, and fortune are NOT innate rights the universe owes to us all on a silver platter simply because we exist. These teachers, harsh as they seemed at the time, were really showing more love and compassion than their more easy-going contemporaries.

This was the Tyler Durden School of Hard Knocks years before Fight Club. “Shock therapy” weeds out the weenies and turns everyone else into pillars of iron. And in my book, it’s the best format of education anyone can get.

I used to think conformity and strict discipline stifled creativity and was therefore “bad.” But it’s only bad if it lasts forever. In reality, stuff needs to get DONE and needs smart, focused people to do it. If you learn your craft under the pain of the Iron Will, then strike out from that point with your own theories and ideas, creativity will bloom – this time from a place of intelligence that moves the world forward, instead from one of random accident.

So Hat’s Off to the Nazi Grade School Teachers of yore – without you, I’d hate to imagine the sad state of affairs I’d be in today.

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