The warnings started in August, when I got my schedule card. "Miss Barton,
aww man." "Granny Barton! She yells alot". She wasn't nice. My first
question to an overclassman (didn't know any overclasswomen who would deign
to reply) was "is she nice?" The answer, from an Alan Iafrate, a Rich
Inglis, a Bard Connally, was always the same. Miss Barton was the only
teacher I had whose rep ruined the waning days of summer.

And then I was in her class that first day and there she was. Short, squat,
E.T. with snowy hair. Not the eyes though, which were deep-set, blue(?)
and went cold and narrow fast if she caught you talking. But she wasn't so bad.
She was even cracking jokes. Not funny jokes; she wasn't Mr. Bennet, or Mr.
Tucker. Her dead-pan delivery suggested she knew we wouldn't laugh. The
message was clear: 9th grade was business. Our permanent records were
starting and in June we had to pass the Regents. Pass, or the F would
follow you for life, like stubborn acne and just as visible. Play time
(Middle School) was over, time to work.

And to laugh. She was still E.T.. She yelled well and often. It was
paralyzing when directed at me, very entertaining when at, say, Pete
Guethlein, who sat in front of me. She fumbled names. Dave Heston joined
us in November of 1971 and was "Mr. Hester" through June. She was never
intentionally funny and still we laughed. She convulsed herself once when
explaining the acronym for remembering sine, cosine and tangent: "now we
meet our old Indian friend SOHCAHTOA, though my teacher told me the way to
remember this was 'go soak your toe' ". This last bit left her, and her
alone, watery-eyed with laughter and a bunch of us smirking. I could see her giggling with a
classmate (Lincoln?) over this math wit. Still, the acronym worked. Sine
equals opposite/hypoteneuse; tangent equals opposite/adjacent, etc.

Which shows what she did best: give tools to pass the regents. When I went
(often) for extra help, the stern, school-marm facade crumbled and a bubbly
Granny Barton assured me, as she did everybody who tried, "I think you're
going to enjoy your algebra!" Well, no, but she worked tirelessly to help
me get familiar with graphs, story problems, all the crap lurking in Part II
of the Regents, and the constant, no-nonsense drill worked. The warmer it
got, the more querulous her voice grew, reminding us not to be sloppy with
story problems, to write it out: "let x =, let y=." Don't lose 2 points by
slipping up on procedure.

By the day of the Regents the class couldn't miss. Sharon Mitchell couldn't
believe my buddies and I did the long story problems when the graph
questions were so easy; Miss Barton had her ready too. All the yelling, the
public humiliation of botching homework at the blackboard, of being caught
doing something other that drilling to pass the Regents, it all delivered a
parade of successes. The Regents was nothing. We all scored in the 90s,
96, 98 whatever. All except Mr. Hester. He got 100.

Dave Virrill