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Lessons on television

I had a fawning crush on my first teacher.

I had a fawning crush on my first teacher. I listened attentively to her every word, quickly did whatever she said to do, shushed those around me making noise while she was talking, felt deflated when our brief daily lessons were over and waited with rapt anticipation every morning for her to kickstart my journey into new, uncharted territory.

I was a school junkie; she was my guru.

It was the first of many such scenarios in my young life and like so many firsts – first love, first illegal spin around the block behind the wheel of someone else’s dad’s car, first barbeque ribs – it’s stuck with me, though I haven’t given those long ago and far away memories much thought in decades.

She was gentle and nurturing like good teachers were supposed to be. She made it fun to learn new things at a time when almost everything in the world was new to the sheltered lives of children whose greatest feats of learning thus far consisted of using a toilet, dressing themselves and not eating with their hands. She poured knowledge into little brains and it was sucked up like rainfall in the desert. She lit fires of curiosity that grew to consume lives and guide future scholars to great discoveries. She was a first, an original, the pioneer of a field to which many parents around the world have entrusted their children’s earliest education.

Her death last week, at age 93, loosened a flood of personal memories so old and foggy they’re like snippets of a faded movie someone chopped into thousands of pieces and taped back together in totally random order. Murky remembrances, more feeling than recall, of a time when my parents had half as many children as they would eventually wind up with. Cold, dark winter mornings in Iowa when the sun never seemed to rise and getting me to trade warm flannel jammies for cold clean clothes took the skills of a hard-nosed labour negotiator. Raw, green envy as I’d watch my older sister bundle up and trek off to school, growing peevishness that I couldn’t follow her, disbelief in how many more years I’d have to wait my turn.

Frances Horwich was my consolation in those years between knowing about school and being old enough to sit in a classroom myself. Her school was only a half-hour long and existed in the grey-green ethereal glow of primitive television Monday through Friday. Miss Frances was my first teacher and Ding Dong School my first alma mater. Out of the millions of unseen faces in the classroom, I was surely her most devoted pupil.

That I must have driven my mother crazy imploring her to drop whatever she was doing, turn on the TV and tune in whatever fuzzy station Miss Frances was on cannot be doubted for she occasionally mentions it still, nearly 50 years later. Sitting on the floor, close enough to the set to render myself prematurely blind and soak up enough electromagnetic radiation to turn me into an alien lifeform, I’d wait for Miss Frances to ring her hand-held school bell, ask me, "How are you today?" and pause patiently while I answered her.

For 30 minutes – I don’t remember commercials though I’m sure they were ever present – she’d read stories, teach new words, lead me in drawing pictures, modeling clay, twisting pipe cleaners and imagining far off places. She’d admonish me to not make a mess, be sure and ask my mother where to fingerpaint – the table, not the carpet – and remind me to bang my drum outside. She’d finish the day’s lesson by reminding me what I’d learned and wishing me well until tomorrow.

Hey, it was a simpler time.

Miss Frances was a real teacher. I don’t know how she was lured onto television in 1952 but in those days before the cult of celebrity, someone thought it made sense to put a real teacher in front of a camera and let her do what she did best: talk to kids. She had gray hair – or maybe blond, black and white television didn’t really distinguish those details too well – a soft countenance and a voice that could tame a charging grizzly or hold the attention of a couple of million three year olds without the benefit of a clown, a cartoon or anything that exploded.

I don’t know how long Ding Dong School lasted. For me, it lasted until real school started, maybe as long as three years. Somewhere along the way, the men who ran TV gradually understood what they had going for them. They began to discern the power crazed four and five year olds wielded over their parents and so they invented Ding Dong School paraphernalia and made Miss Frances gently shill for them.

I vividly remember grinding my parents down until they bought me some wondrous sheet of plastic that clung to the face of our television through the magic of static electricity. I don’t recall what it was called but the idea was I could draw on the plastic as Miss Frances drew or wrote or whatever she did from her studio classroom. When it was all over, the plastic came off the screen, the lesson endured until wiped with a damp cloth and I learned to become a TV consumer, among other things. Magic plastic – possibly the first interactive television ever – was tinted a ghostly green and actually was pretty cool to leave on the TV, giving it faux, if monotone, colour long before that was an option.

In a world dominated by Cowboy Bob, Captain Kangaroo, Pinky Lee and the rest of early TV’s children’s entertainers, Miss Frances was unique. She was the pinnacle television could aspire towards.

I don’t know if she could hold the attention of children today. I don’t know if children today have any attention to hold. Ironically, it is another "educational" children’s television show that probably bears the greatest responsibility for extinguishing children’s attention span. Sesame Street, with its quick cuts, vivid puppet characters and endless marketing spinoffs has been uncritically heralded as "good" television. Maybe yes; maybe no. But if you’ve ever watched the show as an adult, you can’t help but notice the frenetic pace of imagery used to distract and entertain, and wonder just how much teaching is going on.

Forgive me this memoir. I know it’s not nearly as cute as those dog and cat stories nor as raw as my rants against whatever. But the next time you sit your kid down in front of the television, think for a moment about the power of what they’re seeing and learning. Imagine what they’ll remember of the experience 50 years from now.