Once in a while if you’re lucky enough, you get one of those cool high school teachers. Someone who doesn’t fit the mold. For many of us at Charlebois High School that teacher was Mme St-Pierre. I think her first name was Yvette or Yvonne. She was toothless. Kids in higher grades informed us that she used to wear her dentures to class, but would eventually tire of them, pop them out, and drop them into a glass of water on her desk. If you sat up close to her, you might get sprayed by her spittle when grew animated and passionate about what she was teaching. She taught history and a class called ‘Canadian Values’ whatever that meant.
In my class schedule, her course always followed my cooking class, that easy high school credit many of us took. I often snuck out of that lesson with semi-sweet chocolate squares in my pocket, that I would share with my pal Dominique in Mme St-Pierre’s classroom. Once, Dominique popped her chocolate into her mouth before I’d had a chance to unwrap my own. She turned and looked at me, grim-faced, her mouth burbling chocolate foam. “Oh you little B_tch…”. I realized that somehow the semi-sweet and unsweetened chocolate squares had been switched out, unbeknownst to me. I started to laugh uncontrollably and as quietly as I could, shoulders shaking, face down on my desk. Of course Dominique never believed I hadn’t done that on purpose.
I remember one particular assignment in our history class, where the whole class had been assigned roles in the Canadian parliamentary system: members of the ruling party (at this point, we were under the brief and dubious leadership of one Joe Clark), the opposition parties, senators, and even a few pesky journalists. It was here I learned the Liberals were called “Grits” and that mysteriously, liberals were assigned the colour red, “Tories” were blue. I was a journalist and had to write a defamatory article about what the Tories were doing at the time. The publication involved going to the school’s administrative office to use the old mimeograph machine to print my newspaper. An original document was hand written onto carbon paper, coated with the strange and distinctive smelling mixture of ink and wax. The negative image inky sheet was wrapped around a drum and a sheet of paper inserted into the mimeograph; when you turned the manual handle the image was pressed onto the paper. Like the smell of gasoline or cigarette, this was a smell I loved and maybe I got just a little high while performing this intoxicating, meditative and strangely satisfying printing ritual.
For some reason in Mme St-Pierre’s class my crippling inhibitions and anxieties were lessened. Maybe it’s because she was such an unconventional character, it gave us all license to be ourselves, insecurities, eccentricities, and all. She held court over the entire class in her unthreatening yet commanding way. When flustered by rambunctious teens in the class, she’d perch on the edge of her desk, look to the ceiling, and mournfully wail “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”. But you could tell she loved us all. And she loved being a teacher. This made us love her in return and taught us so much more than history.
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