On Being Different: What I Learned From My Teacher’s Hands

Photo by Milan Popovic on Unsplash

She was short and a little stocky around the middle with long dark hair. She wore glasses, Harry Potter-like, way before Harry came to class. Her room was in the basement; her desk was positioned to the right of the door as you came in; the wall behind was piled with books on wall-to-wall shelves. Her name started with an M — Mrs. M, my 6th-grade teacher with special hands. 

It was her hands that I remember the most. They were cut off at the knuckles on all four fingers, except the thumb on both hands. She kept her thumbnails long and shaped; sometimes she would paint them bright red because beauty still mattered, even on two nails.

I loved how she held her pen with the knuckle. Her penmanship was mini artwork, crafted in the loops and strokes of cursive communication. That was an inked testament to some childhood grit and determination. She never told us how it happened; at least, not that I remember.

She was rather no-nonsense. She never bared her soul, but she bared those hands. They passed by us day after day in a parade of yellow-lined paper and chalkboard lessons. I thought she was brave. It's an inner steel that faces laughing, taunting, teasing middle schoolers who could sometimes use disability and difference like a ball to toss in a cruel sport.

Mrs. M and her hands entered my world when I entered the awkward years. We were officially academic inbetweeners. Deficient in menstrual hormones, we lacked the sassy self-assurance of our high school role models. Our growth spurt pudge made us look more like overgrown babies of elementary school. We suffered long and hard from self-consciousness that tortured us daily and made us do strange things, like taking too many trips to the lavatory to check the size of our latest disgusting whitehead. Or begging our parents for lunch money instead of brown paper bags of gooey misshapen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. 

It was the time when being different was not desirable. We followed unspoken rules about everything from the line width of our ruled paper to the make and model of our pens (the Bic Fountain Pen with replaceable plastic ink vials was all the rage then).

Such shenanigans and social sophistication exhausted me and my hypersensitive feelings. What was wrong with me? Quiet instead of giggly. Studious instead of silly. Why did I always worry about fitting in instead of just being who I really was, whitehead zits and all?

The winter of '76 was Lake Erie's finest display of what northerners call lake effect snow. It was too cold to take our uniform-skirted selves outside and the snow was deeper than our knee-high socks. So my cronies and I sat at the table during recess and played cards. My girlfriend used to do this little fanned shuffle where she'd hold the split deck with her thumb to alternately stack them, then bend them down and release them in a quick fan of cards. She said it was called The Bridge. I envied that casino skill. 

So that snowy, stormy week, while the flakes squalled outside the high basement windows, I sat and practiced. The cards flopped over and over again but I couldn’t quite get the knack, even with my long piano-playing fingers. I didn’t know that Mrs. M had been watching me…and my hands.

Toward the end of the week, she sauntered over just as the cards collapsed in another failed bridge. She glanced around at each of us then held out her hand, silently asking for the deck. My friends and I exchanged quick glances of uncertainty. What was she going to do? Could she even shuffle cards with severed fingers, let alone build the bridge? With a quick hand chuck of the cards in her palm, she split the stack, held the bent pile with her one-inch fingers, and cascaded them down in perfect succession.

Mrs. M could build beautiful bridges, too. No limits. No self-consciousness. No victimization by whatever mishap or misfortune had brought her and her lovely hands to teach us.

Funny, in all my talk of teaching, I think it’s my grandiose plans, my smart mastery of complex processes, maybe my clever examples and stories that do the trick. I’m sure at some level those things seep in. I know I learned and earned my 6th grade A’s. But I was taught by hands that year. Maybe Mrs. M’s message penetrated my brain because her hands massaged my heart. That’s some good teaching right there.