Part I: 1970s Snippets of Somers Teachers

Junior High School and High School four decades in the past, I can no longer tell any detailed stories about my teachers growing up in Somers. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any good ones. The best I can do is provide some snippets and hopefully they give a decent representation of how valuable all these teachers were to us.

Mr. Pellegrino

I think Mr. Pellegrino’s 8th grade social studies class is where I really began my love of history. I loved the stories, and they were told well. The first one I can remember involved the moving image.

I obviously knew about the JFK assassination. But I had no idea there was actual footage where we actually saw the President’s head explode. Well, we saw it in Mr. Pellegrino’s class. Could you imagine the outrage today? I mean, how cool were the 70s.

I also had my first in depth study of WWII. Along the way, we were all struck by the image of Mussolini strung up by his feet - especially after seeing all the cheering crowds Il Duce inspired on the way up. So one girl asked the obvious question. "How come the Italian people turned so violently against their leader?"

His answer went beyond just the historical forces at hand. “Everybody loves a winner,” Mr. Pellegrino deadpanned succinctly.

We got a history lesson and perfect description of human nature in terms we understood clearly.

Mrs. Curry

Our 7th grade music teacher, I really had no use for this subject. I wasn’t a musician, and I wasn’t going to be one. Additionally, music class was mostly a nuisance - given the mathematician I thought I was supposed to be. So it goes without saying that Mrs Curry did not rise to the level of my other teachers. But looking back, she was pretty damn, “punk rock,” as Jack Black said in The School of Rock.

At the time, though, I had barely even scratched the surface as a listener, and believe it or not, this 75 year old woman knew more about Rock ’n Roll than I did. I had no idea who Bruce Springsteen was when she hung his Time Magazine cover photo on the wall and talked about this talented young musician. On the other hand, I did know who Kiss was. They were all the rage with me and my classmates.

For her part, she had a fancy for a single called “Beth,” and made the Peter Criss song part of our final. An audio exam, she pre-empted the question with a little commentary.

Mrs. Curry extolled the beauty of the melody and criticized adults who heard Rock ’n Roll as nothing but noise. Beth was her contemporary example. Imagine that, an unhip old lady who had an open mind and verified what we knew to be true about our music. More importantly, she heard us and recognized us whole people. Too bad, we couldn’t have gotten her to teach our parents well.

Miss Warns

The image of Ms. Warns on the first day of high school is still seared in my mind. Long straight blonde hair and a tight white sweater with the goods to fill it out, I was floored. She wasn’t empty up top either and had a biting wit. The first snippet arrived before I did in my brother’s yearbook

Dear Steve: I hope you managed to learn something this year. You certainly added something - though I’m not sure what, she laid out the sarcasm.

Nice.

Of course, she went on to wish him luck and success, and then she got stuck with me.

Math was my thing back then, and I did well. However, I didn’t like that she used to grade our notebooks to gauge how well we took notes. Mine was a complete mess, but I can certainly recognize that it was a nice try. Everything in my life is still a mess.

Complaints aside, the moment that resonates involved trigonometry and the four quadrants. Sine, cosine, tangent and cotangent (or all) are positive in quadrant one, sin in quadrant two, tangent in quadrant three and cosine in quadrant four. That works out to ASTC and could be a lot to remember.

So she provided a mnemonic. “Albany State Teacher’s College.” But one of ours probably had a little inside information on the lesson plan and was quick to provide a better reminder.

“All Students Take Cocaine,” Tom H thought he was pretty clever.

But the freshman was out of his element and Ms. Warns proved as equally ready. “No students can afford cocaine,” she regained the upper hand.

Well played, and none of us speed dialed our dealers to hook us up with some lines anyway. Even so, it was still fortunate she had the 70s as a backdrop or we might have missed out on a teacher who had pretty good command on both sides of her brain.

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Click for 1970s and 1980s Somers Tuskers Slideshow: http://rmonetti.blogspot.com/2016/03/old-newspaper-clips-somers-tuskers.html