This time of year, when little kids come home from school with hand-print turkeys and construction paper Pilgrim and Indian costumes, calls to mind a gem of a story written by a Hawaii teacher nearly 100 years ago.
"Hiawatha in Hawaii" is an essay first published in 1929 that recalls the author’s experience as a neophyte teacher in 1912.
"I had a roomful of 50, and 50 is a lot to make mind in a drowsy, warm, chalk-dusted schoolroom," she wrote. "They squirmed in their seats, they poked their toes through the cracks of the seats of the children in front; they brought centipedes without nippers. They were terrible."
Genevieve Taggard was born in Washington state but came to Hawaii as a toddler when her parents came to teach. When her father got sick, Taggard left high school and took over his classroom of fourth-graders.
" … I was only 18 years old and didn’t have any idea how to bang them into shape," she wrote. To make matters worse, the school was right next to an aging soda water factory with a loud, arrhythmic pump that drove her crazy all day long. Still, she loved her students and did her best by them. When a letter arrived from the Department of Public Instruction commanding her to stage a dramatic presentation of Longfellow’s "Hiawatha" poem, she privately cursed the "damn Hiawatha play" but then gamely read it to her wiggly class and tried to use it to her best advantage.
" … smirking as little as possible, I gave a little speech, ending up by saying that Hiawatha was a good boy and never hurt living things and never cut the nippers off centipedes (joke for me) and behaved very well in all his social relationships."
Taggard’s naughtiest students naturally started competing to play the part of the hero, Hiawatha, and for a time, her classroom was a model of decorum. "On that speech, we lived peaceably for some time; almost two days." The story goes on to describe a schoolroom situation a hundred years ago that seems like it could have happened just this week at a school down the street.
The Taggard family left Hawaii in 1914. Genevieve Taggard went on to graduate from the University of California at Berkeley. She later taught at Mount Holyoke, Bennington and Sarah Lawrence colleges. Many collections of her poems were published, though none is currently in print. (The Hawaii State Library has a book of her poems, "Origin: Hawaii," published by the Star-Bulletin in 1947, in the reference section.)
"Hiawatha in Hawaii" can be found in the collection "A Hawaiian Reader," first published by Mutual Publishing in 1984 and still in print. Taggard may not be one of the writers most often associated with Hawaii, like Stevenson and London and Twain, but her observations of that classroom 100 years ago are spot-on and timeless.
Lee Cataluna can be reached at lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
