RIVER CITY JOURNAL: GOOD LESSONS, LEARNED WHILE YOU'RE YOUNG, LAST FOREVER

An attempted insurrection against an eighth grade math teacher meant just one thing: Mr. White was now in charge.

A school bus driver in the St. Louis area was in a lot of hot water this week after it was learned she asked some students -- just the bigger kids, I hope -- to get out and try to push the bus out of a mud hole.

The effort was unsuccessful. A construction worker used another vehicle and a chain to do the job. Students splattered with mud showed up for school a half-hour late. And the driver was called on the carpet.

These days, a lot of folks don't do what common sense tells them to do, because there might be undesirable consequences and some angry parents. Sure, some of those students could have been injured trying to push the bus. But without even trying, they could have missed a whole day of school.

Once upon a time -- which is how all fairy tales and stories about the good old days start -- any boy riding a school bus would have been considered a wimp if he didn't jump off any bus stuck in the mud or unable to get up an icy hill.

It was more than a display of macho. Young farm boys were strong. The bus driver knew that. Staying stuck on some gravel road out in the woods wouldn't have been a picnic either, particularly in winter.

During my early school years, the one-room school era, there were no school buses. I was fortunate my first year, because Mrs. Rayfield had to pass right by the Kelo Valley gravel road as she took the highway to Shady Nook School over in Greenwood Valley. I was one of the lucky students who could walk a mile up to the highway and catch a ride in Mrs. Rayfield's shiny black Ford.

Later, my mother taught school in some one-room schools around the area, and I rode with her.

In the eighth grade I started going to school in town. By this time, the little country schools were all consolidating, and the town school sent buses for miles and miles through the surrounding Ozarks to pick up students who sometimes spent more time on a bus longer each day than they did in school.

I walked up to the highway to meet the bus for a couple of years. Mr. Mann was the driver. He was the no-nonsense, dependable sort. Any parent who saw their child get on Mr. Mann's bus knew the youngster was in good hands.

Besides, Mr. Mann was a dad, and while you were on his bus he was your dad. And if that didn't work, all Mr. Mann had to do was tell your mom or dad, and that would take care of that.

Mr. Mann was pretty tolerant as bus drivers go, but there were limits. We all knew what those boundaries were, and we rarely tried to go past them. Mr. Mann had a way of looking up into the big mirror over the driver's seat, the one that showed all of the passengers, and commanding a change in behavior without even saying a word. When we all settled down, he would just smile. And drive on.

We knew who was boss on the bus, just like we knew who was boss at home. And we knew who was in charge at school. Every teacher had absolute, unquestioned authority in the classroom. Some teachers, like Mr. John Paul Jones, longtime principal and teacher, were feared more than others. Mr. Jones had a way with a paddle that established the law of the school. There were no appeals, no continuances, no plea bargains in the principal's office.

Mr. Henry White, superintendent and fill-in teacher, counselor, adviser, mentor and all-around stabilizing influence, also knew how to run a classroom.

I remember when I was in the eighth grade -- there were nearly 60 of us in one classroom -- the math teacher left after a nervous breakdown generally blamed on her students, over whom she had absolutely no control. I'll never know why all the other teachers maintained order, but not the math teacher. In any event, things got so out of hand that the teacher quit, and Mr. White personally took over the class. He also supervised the lunch-hour detention that all of us endured for the rest of the quarter.

We weren't simply being punished. We learned a lot from Mr. White, more than just eighth-grade math. An awful lot of kids in that class went on to be pretty successful, and many of them chose teaching as a career. I think Mr. White may have helped in that regard.

Throughout our school years, we learned to be responsible individuals who recognized that authority rested not in our hands, but in the hands of capable and caring teachers who wanted to see us succeed. In the process, they took no guff. We wouldn't have understood anything else.

When I went to college, I was shocked during my first week of classes to discover my professors wanted to know what I thought. I quickly discovered that college was different in a lot of ways. Mainly, in college you were expected to make most of your own decisions -- within a fairly rigid framework of guidelines.

If this were a fairy tale, I would have to come up with an ending that showed we all lived happily ever after. We didn't. Some of my contemporaries wound up in federal prisons and turned out to be good for nothing after all. My schooling wasn't perfect.

But I know this for sure: We all had a chance to make the most of what we were given, and many of us did. When we were young, we relied on our teachers to guide us. When we were in college, we were given a little freedom to experiment with our maturity. And when we were on our own, we tried to draw upon the lessons we learned at the hands of firm but fair adults.

For all of that, I am truly thankful.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.