virgilfry

I have never known a man more fascinating than Mr. Virgil T. Fry. His fascination grows daily because I have never met him.

Mr. Fry, you see, was my predecessor in a small Indiana high school. He was a teacher of the social studies, and he was fired for incompetency. I was brought in to take his place.

Dr. Kelwell, the superintendent of schools in Akara, first told me about Virgil T. Fry. "Fry," he said, "was a most impossible man to work with. I hope you will not be like him."

"What was his trouble?" I asked.

"Never anything in on time. Very hard man to work with. Never took advice," was his reply. Dr. Kelwell paused an leaned back in his chair. He shook his head violently. "Very poor professional spirit." He nodded as if to agree with himself, then repeated, "I hope you won't be like him."

The principal, Mr. Hasbolt, was considerably more blunt.

"You have a great chance here," he said. "Mr. Fry, your predecessor, was a very poor teacher. He antagonized everyone. Constant source of friction. I don't recall when we ever had a teacher here who created more dissension among our faculty. Not only his own department, either. Everyone in this building hated that man, I really do believe. I certainly hope you won't make the same mistakes." He wring my hand vigorously as if to welcome me as a real relief from a most pressing and unpleasant problem.

The head of the social studies department in which I worked was more like Dr. Kelwell than like Mr. Hasbolt. He merely hinted at Mr. Fry's discrepancies. "Very inadequate scholar. Very unsound. Apt to go off half-cocked," he mused.

"In what way?" I asked.

"Oh--lots of ways. You know, crackpot ideas. Poor tact in expressing them. You have a real opportunity here to do a good job. I certainly hope you won't make Fry's mistakes."

But if the head of my department was indirect, the head of the English department wasn't. "That man!" she sniffed. "He really was a terrible person. I'm not an old maid, and I'm not prudish, but Virgil T. Fry was a most intolerable person. He not only thought he could teach social studies and made a mess of it, but he also tried to tell me how to teach English. In fact, he tried to tell everyone how to do everything."

Miss Kennedy was neither an old maid not prudish, and she was correct when she intimated that the rest of the staff felt as she did. Mr. Fry had insulted the music department, the science department, and above all the physical education department.

Tiff Small was head of athletics. He was a fine man with who I subsequently played a great deal of golf and some tennis. He wouldn't discuss Fry. "That pansy!" and he would sniff his big nose into a wrinkle. "Pretty poor stuff."

Mr. Virgil T. Fry's landlady ultimately became my landlady, too, and she bore out everything the faculty had said about her former boarder. "Never cleaned his room up. Smoked cigarettes and dropped the ashes. I hope you don't smoke. You don't? Well, I'm certainly glad. But this Mr. Fry, my he was a hard man to keep house for. I pity the poor girl that gets him."

Remembering Tiff Small's insinuation, I asked my landlady if Fry ever went with girls. "Him?" He courted like it was his sole occupation. Finally married a girl from Akara. She was a typist downtown. Had been to the University of Chicago. Very stuck up girl, but not any better than she had to be, if you want my opinion. Quite a girl, and quite good enough for Virgil T. Fry."

As the year went on I learned more about Fry. He must have been a most objectionable person indeed, for the opinion concerning him was unanimous. In a way I was glad, for I profited from his previous sins. Everyone was glad to welcome me into the school system and into the town for, to put it baldly, I was a most happy relief from Virgil T. Fry.

Apart from his personality he was also a pretty poor teacher. I found one of his roll books once and just for fun distributed his grades along the normal curve. What a mess they were! He had 18% A's when he should have had no more than 8%! His B's were the same. An when I reached the F's, he was following no system at all. One person with a total score of 183 was flunked. The next, with a total score of 179, had received a C! And in the back of his desk I found 247 term papers he had never even opened! I laughed and congratulated myself on being at least more honest than my predecessor, even if I excelled him in no other way.

I was in this frame of mind when Doris Kelley, the 16-year-old daughter of a local doctor, came into my room one evening after school. "May I ask you a question?" she asked.

"Of course."

"Maybe you won't like it," she replied, hesitating a moment.

I laughed. "Certainly I will. What is it?"

"Why don't you teach the way Mr. Fry did?"

I was taken aback. "How did he teach?" I asked.

"Oh," was the answer. "He made everything so interesting."

I swallowed and asked her to elaborate.

"Well, Mr. Fry always taught as if everything he talked about was of utmost importance. You got to love America when you got through a course with Mr. Fry. He always had a joke. He wasn't afraid to skip chapters now and then. Much better than the English teachers, only they didn't like it very much. And did you read books when Mr. Fry taught you! Ten, maybe, a year, and all in the very kinds of things you liked best. Hitler, strikes, the Constitution, and all about crime. Just anything you wanted to read. And class was always so interesting. Not boring." She stopped and looked at me across the desk with a bit of Irish defiance in her eye.

She was a somewhat mature girl and I concluded that she had had a crush on this remarkable Mr. Virgil T. Fry. "Did all the pupils feel that way?" I asked her.

"I know what you're thinking," she said, smiling. "But you're wrong. Everyone liked him. Almost every one of them did. And the reason I came in to see you this evening is that none of us like the way you teach. It's all so very dull!"

I blushed. Everyone had been telling me what a fine job I was doing. I stammered a bit, "Well, Mr. Fry and I teach two different ways."

"Oh, no," she insisted, "it's not that. Mr. Fry really taught. He taught us something every day. I'll bet if you ask all the pupils they'll all say the same thing. He was about the only real teacher we had."

I became somewhat provoked and said a very stupid thing. "Then why was he fired?"

No answer.

"You did know he was fired, didn't you?"

Doris nodded.

"Why?" I repeated.

Doris laughed. "Don't you know? All the kids do." And she stood in the door smiling. "Jealousy," she said.

I was alarmed. I wondered if the pupils really did dislike my teaching as much as Doris had implied. The next day in a class of which Doris was not a member I tried an experiment.

"Well," I said, "we've now reached the end of the first unit. I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to go back to a discussion of the big ideas of this unit?"

I paused.

Not much response, so I added: "The way Mr. Fry used to do it."

Immediately all the pupils sat up and started to pay attention. Most of them smiled. Two of the girls giggled and some of the boys squirmed. They obviously wanted to accept my suggestion. "Tom," I asked. "Will you take over?" for I had no idea what Mr. Fry's method was.

Tom nodded vigorously and came to the front of the room.

"All right," he rasped, "who will dare?"

"I will," said a girl. "I believe that Columbus came to the New World for more religious reasons than commercial reasons."

"Oh!" groaned a group of pupils, snapping their fingers for attention. Tom called on one.

"I think that's a very stupid reasoning, Lucille. Spain was only using religion as a mask for imperialism."

Lucille turned in her seat and shot back, "You wouldn't think so if you knew anything about Philip the Second."

And the debate continued until Tom issued his next dare. A pupil accepted and defiantly announced: "I think all that section about Spain's being so poor at colonizing is the malarkey. Everything south of Texas except Brazil is now Spanish. That looks pretty good to me.

I winced at the word "malarkey" and the pupils winced at the idea. The tigers of Anglo-Saxony rose to the defense of the text and the challenging pupil did his best to stand them off.

A few nights later I drove some other pupils to a basketball game in a nearby city. One of the boys observed, as we were coming home: "Class has been much better lately. I sort of like history now."

"How do you mean, better?" I asked.

"Oh, more the way Mr. Fry used to teach."

"Was Mr. Fry such a good teacher?" I asked.

"Oh, boy." chortled the crowd, all at once. And one continued. "Was he? Boy he could really teach you. I learned more from him than my big brother did at the university in the same course. That's a fact! I had to read more, too, but I certainly liked it."

"I always thought he was rather--well, sissy?" I observed.

"Fry? Oh, no!" the boys replied. "It's true he didn't like the athletic department and used to make some pretty mean cracks about athletes, but we all liked it a lot. No, Mr. Fry was a very good tennis player and could swim like a fish."

The question of reading bothered me. I had always aspired to have my pupils read a great deal, and here they were all telling me that last year they had read and this year they hadn't. I went to see Miss Fisher, the librarian, about it.

"No," she said, "the books aren't going out the way they did last year."

"Could it be that maybe Mr. Fry knew how to use the library better?" I asked.

"Oh no!" was the laughing reply. "You're twice the teacher Mr. Fry was. All the staff thinks so. He was a terrible person around the library.

This depressed me, and I sought for an answer outside the school. I went around that night to visit Dr. Kelley, Doris' father.

"The fact is," he said, "you're in a tough spot. Virgil T. Fry was a truly great teacher. You're filling the shoes of a master. I hear the children talking at the table and about the house. Fry seems to have been the only teacher who ever really got under their skins and taught them anything."

He paused, then added, "As a matter of fact, the pupils find your teaching rather empty, but I'm glad to say they think it's been picking up recently." He knocked out his pipe and smiled at me.

"Then why was Fry fired?" I asked.

"Difference of opinion, I guess," the doctor replied. "Fry thought education consisted of stirring up and creating. He made himself very unpopular. You see, education is really a complete social venture. I see that from being on the school board. Fry was excellent with pupils, but he made a terrible mess of his adult relationships."

"You're also a father," I said. "Don't you think your daughter deserves to have good teachers?"

He lit his pipe again. "Of course, if you want the truth. I'd rather have Doris study under Fry than under you. In the long run she'd learn more." He smiled wryly. "At the same time, what she learns from you may be better for her in the long run than what she could have learned from Fry."

"May I ask you one question, Doctor?" I inquired. He assented. "Did you concur in Fry's dismissal?"

Dr. Kelley looked at me a long time and drew on his pipe. Then he laughed quietly. "I cut the board meeting that night. I knew the problem was coming up."

"How would you have voted?" I persisted.

"I think I would always cut the board meeting," he answered. "Fry was a disruptive force. He was also a very good teacher. I think the two aspects balanced precisely. I would neither hire him nor fire him. I wouldn't fight to keep him in a school and I wouldn't raise a finger to get him out of one."

I frowned.

He continued: "The fine aspect of the whole thing is that you, a beginning teacher, don't have to be all Fry or all yourself. You can be both a great teacher and a fine, social individual. It's possible."

Dr. Kelley laughed again as he showed me to the door. "Don't worry about it. And you may be interested to know that your superintendent, Dr. Kelwell, feels just as I do about the whole problem. He stood out till the last minute to keep Fry. Very reluctant to have him go."

I went home badly confused, and I have remained so ever since.

As I said before, I have never known a man so fascinating as Mr. Virgil T. Fry. Not a member of his faculty has a good word to say for him and not a pupil in any of his classes has an unkind word to say against him.