Busted, Chastened, and Enlightened

In this Kappa Delta Pi Record article, retired Missouri educator Julia Frank Hundman recalls how her seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. B., once asked students to write a poem of their own. “It seemed to me that love, angst, and all sorts of turmoil were requirements for good poetry,” says Hundman. “I was a happy-go-lucky, superficial kid and just not sure what to do with those emotions.” She ended up copying a poem from an obscure source, sure that Mrs. B. wouldn’t be able to trace it.

But the teacher immediately spotted the fact that it wasn’t original work. At the end of the next class, Mrs. B. asked Hundman to stay after class. “She sat me down at the side of her desk in ‘that’ chair and asked if I wrote the poem. I remember squirming and admitting I copied it. I was embarrassed, but more frightened that she would call my parents.”

Instead, Mrs. B. asked that the assignment be done again. “I am sure at the time she let me know that what I did was dishonest and seriously wrong,” Hundman recalls, “but the lesson I remember is, ‘You can do this. Just give it a try.’” After a struggle, she finally wrote a poem, Mrs. B. accepted it, and Hundman’s parents were never the wiser.

After graduating from college in 1975, Hundman began a long career as a health and physical education teacher. “During those years,” she says, “Mrs. B’s advice rarely let me down. Calmly assuming that each student would succeed after serious effort usually worked, just as it had for me.”

“‘Give It a Try!’” by Julia Frank Hundman in Kappa Delta Pi Record, January-March 2013 (Vol. 49, #1, p. 47), no e-link available

From the Marshall Memo #473