COLUMN: What’s a P.C.?

In other words, there’s a history among a lot of us around here. We get together and reminisce about the time somebody fell in a not-quite-empty septic tank, or trick-or-treating on 3rd Avenue, or going by Dr. Etheridge’s house at holidays to see what kind of elaborate vignette he had rigged up at their Buena Vista home.

And Mrs. Wynn let us bring records to school. Yes, they were the little 45 rpm vinyls folks see in antique shops and flea markets next to the eight track tapes. If the weather was bad, she would set up her record player in the classroom and we could have a dance during recess. Since we were sixth graders and since we had a 15-minute recess in the mornings and a 30-minute break in the afternoons and we could dance with the object of our affections, we loved being able to be inside.

Mrs. Wynn was wise. Without anyone funding something like An Analysis to Determine the Stated Outcome of the Benefits of Offering Alternative Recreational Activities for the Purpose of Promoting the Physical Welfare and Providing for Social Decision Making Opportunities for Public School Children in Adolescence (More Specifically, the 11 – 13 Year Age Range) and the Possible Ramifications for Not Including Every Possible Combination of Music to Address the Representation of Age, Race, Ethnicity, Religious Preference, Gender and Related Preference, and Composition of the Kitchen Sink, my sixth grade teacher contributed to a lifetime of wonderful memories, the development of positive social skills, and got the energy worked out of a classroom of kids who needed to move around.

Back then, we didn’t worry about Political Correctness. We were who we were from the family we were born in with the baggage we brought to the table. While some worked harder than others to ensure we treated each other with respect (though we just were trying to make sure we were fair and if we hurt somebody’s feelings, we made sure we apologized later), it all worked out in the end. We accepted that some kids were different than others and learned to co-exist as a group.

In Eulalia Wynn’s classroom, the term “P.C.” took on a whole different meaning. As kids will do, there was always somebody who took advantage of her patience and good natured approach to the hormone-driven sixth graders in her charge. They took too long at the water fountain, talked to a neighboring student when they were supposed to be listening, dawdled in the bathroom during breaks – little things that said to her that they thought they were special or not in tune with the rest of the class and the task at hand.

So she would ask: “Do you think you’re a P.C.?” We learned early in the school year that “P.C.” stood for “Privileged Character”. Being a P.C. in Mrs. Wynn’s class was akin to being “common” in the vernacular of most Southerners, particularly my mother. You just didn’t want to be the personification of that term.

In 1954, one of Haase, Jr.’s classmates was a young man who decided that the middle of Mrs. Wynn’s English lesson seemed to be a good time to sharpen his pencil. He stood up, walked to the pencil sharpener and began cranking while she was in the middle of conjugating verbs. She stopped talking, looked at this young man and said:

“Do you think you’re a P.C.?”

Apparently, he had missed the definition earlier that year. He turned with a pleading look on his face:

“Mrs. Wynn, what is a P.C.?”

My brother, always the smart aleck, replied in a way that I have adopted as my philosophy of the process of trying to make everybody the same when we obviously are not: “It’s a Public Commode.” Mrs. Wynn collapsed in a fit of laughter. She was such a great teacher.

Class dismissed.

Helen Person is a columnist for the Barrow Journal. E-mail comments about this column to helenperson@windstream.net.