Mr. Bill Polson

For some of us, Bill Polson was our 10th grade World History teacher. While I've taken pains to either ignore those about whom I have nothing good to say, Bill Polson is my first exception. That's not to imply that I have only bad things to say about him, it's more that I just have nothing good to say about him...yet he was an interesting character.

Mr. Polson was, in my estimation, the laziest teacher I recall throughout my schooling. He also had the job of keeping the locker assignments straight and dealing with lost or broken locks. After school, I think he drove a school bus. For Mr. Polson, teaching consisted of taking out his textbook and reading from it...verbatim. His delivery was a slow monotone drawl, the cadence broken only by his looking up occasionally to see who had nodded off.

Thankfully, he broke up the monotony of his class by having a couple of girls write the test questions on the chalk board a day or two before the Friday test...the every Friday test. Only girls did the chalk board writing and not always the same girls, but they were usually attractive.

Everyone in class had to copy those questions off onto their own papers in order to study them for the upcoming test which always consisted of those same questions, verbatim. It may never have occurred to Mr. Polson to mimeograph the questions onto a handout as was done by most other teachers; or it may have been something else. As I mentioned in another posting, girls of our day wore loose-fitting dresses similar to those worn by their mothers, so we boys had little opportunity to effectively appraise their figures.

However, an interesting thing occurred when the girls of that day wrote on the chalk boards. Due to some complicated principles of leverage (one of Newton's laws), the pressure exerted by her arm on the chalk board caused her backside to jut out in an equal and opposite direction and move in sync with her writing arm. So, if she were writing quickly, well the reactive movement going on under that dress was pretty quick also. Now, that made concentrating on writing those questions onto your paper somewhat difficult, but the weekly shows were memorable.

I wonder if Mr. Polson ever picked up on that...h-m-m.

Rounding out his week by having a couple of girls, always girls, grade the Friday tests and write the results in his grade book, Mr. Polson was set for a quiet weekend to repair himself for a couple of days of strenuous reading from his textbook the following week. As I said, he was an interesting character.



Dieu merci pour les jolies filles