Tracey Welch, GPC Student

No Apples Here

First day of school. First day of high school. First class of my first day of high school. Sitting at her organized desk while welcoming each terrified student with a slight nod of her head, my Language Arts teacher was far from living up to the apple loving, traditional “teacher image.” Her name was Ms. Cooney (known as just “Cooney” to all of her students), and her personality was as unique as her appearance. Her mousy brown hair, parted straight down the middle, fell limply around her pale, make-up-less face. Her bangs lay straight across her forehead, and her Alfalfa-like ears stuck straight out. She wore earth tones well and always dressed in either a brown or green shirt with the same wrinkled khaki pants. I remembered feeling somewhat intimidated by her appearance. I was never one to just sit with my mouth shut in class. While knowing the teachers’ limits, I always contributed to the discussions and offered a humorous comment where I saw fit. I was unsure how Cooney would accept a sense of humor such as this and, at the moment I first saw her, I mentally prepared to censor the funny asides in lectures. Knowing what I know now, I had no reason to worry.

I had previously heard stories from upper classmen who had already experienced Ms. Cooney’s bizarre, modern, ‘90s teaching methods at Chattahoochee High School in Alpharetta, Georgia. However, no story could have prepared me for what was to come. The first major lesson in her class was over Odysseus and the archetypal journey in The Odyssey. This un-interesting process of mapping the hero’s journey failed to spark any interest in the minds of the fourteen and fifteen-year-olds in her class. Cooney, realizing we would remain mind numbingly bored if she religiously followed the curriculum, thought of a way to appeal to these box office-loving, “me generation” teenagers. After doing some mild research Cooney found that Armageddon, a movie in which everyone was either interested in the action or the love story between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, also followed the archetypal journey. There was not a person absent from class the days we watched the movie. A mid term exam would later test our knowledge of the subject and, while taking the test, I found I was able to recall the archetype map with such ease by relating it to a modern example. There was no doubt that Cooney’s judgment on teaching methods attracted the attention of the vast majority of her students.

I would later have her as my American Literature teacher junior year. As I had expected, nothing had changed. On the first day of school she wore, with confidence, a three-cornered Puritan hat to illustrate that we would start the year studying early colonial literature. To illustrate movements such as romanticism, transcendentalism, and existentialism she would have us watch Jurassic Park, The Crucible, and an X-Files episode portraying ideas of murder and even incest. However strange I found her teaching methods, I now find I remember almost every lesson from her class.

It was blindingly apparent that my personality was drastically different from that of Ms. Cooney. During second semester of my junior year I remembered she started class by saying, “I am a liberal, existential, feminist.” As she went on describing her personality, I found it extremely difficult to maintain my calm composure. I was the exact opposite of Cooney and, with following statements, I felt my face turn deeper shades of red with my progressing, bottled anger. In any normal circumstance I would have raised my hand and voiced my protested, conservative opinion. However, in this certain situation, she was so charismatic that for once I kept my mouth shut. Not once did she proclaim her arguably radical opinions as the only way of thinking. It was only this that enabled me to respect an outlook so different than mine.

There was nothing stereotypical about a teacher like Ms. Cooney. There were no denim jumpers, no apples on the desk, and no cute classroom decorations displayed on bulletin boards. As hard as it was for me to learn to respect such a different view, I enjoyed her teaching techniques more than any other teacher in high school.