fly far. Next to the twenty-five-cent model was a fifty-cent model with a rubber band-powered propeller, but that would have to wait for next time.
I plopped down my quarter on the counter in front of the store clerk and asked for the twenty-five-cent model. With my Superman record album in one hand and my new model plane in the other, I ran out of the store to a nearby park to put the little model together to see if it would fly as advertised. Balsa wood is very fragile, and I had to be very careful putting my little toy airplane together. I carefully slid the wings though the fuselage and then attached the elevator and rudder to the tail as the directions indicated. I held the little model and threw it as straight as I could. To my amazement, it really did fly far, much farther than the little paper airplanes I often made at home. Watching the little toy plane soar on the breeze stirred my imagination even further. I imagined that I was soaring along inside it, off to some faraway place. When it touched down, I ran to it and threw it again, watching as it banked left and right until its flight was inevitably cut short by a tree or a park bench. As the weeks went by, I listened to my album every day on our record player. I was reliving the flying scenes in my head. Afterwards, I would go outside and play with my toy planes. On the rare occasions that I had the patience to wait to amass the fifty cents needed to buy the propeller model, I watched with glee as the little rubber-band-driven propeller pulled the little plane even further through the sky... it was worth the wait.
This period also began my unwitting love affair with the library and reading. After borrowing the Superman soundtrack, I became infatuated with all things Superman. I borrowed book after book that had anything to do with Superman and consumed them all with a voracious appetite. I did not realize that I was actually improving my language skills and learning to be a better reader... I simply thought I was having fun. Since Superman was of such supreme interest to me, reading books (especially illustrated ones) about him and his history did not seem like “work”. It was then that I began to discover that having a passion for ANYTHING makes that thing a joy to do. After running out of books about Superman to read, I started reading adventure books about settlers heading west, shipwrecked sailors, and pilots lost in the Bermuda triangle. I couldn’t get enough of reading, and would imagine one day traveling to all the places about which I was reading.
Mr. Kuck
Many of us have that one teacher who when we look back, had a major impact on our lives and helped set us on the course to success in life. For me, that was Mr. Kuck.
In fall 1983, I started fifth grade, and although I was an avid reader, I was still very much an average student. I specialized in never doing much more than was necessary to get by. I was more concerned with rushing through my boring homework so that ironically, I could go to the library to read! I also loved playing Pac-Man with Betty on the Atari 2600 videogame system our parents had bought for us and watching Michael Jackson videos. Mom continued to encourage Betty and me to try our best in school, but I thought why should I try harder? I can pass everything just fine without much effort, which leaves me with more time to do the things that I actually want to do! That attitude of minimal effort soon came face to face with an immovable object that demanded my maximum effort... Mr. Kuck, my fifth-grade teacher.
There were two fifth-grade classes in P.S. 18, one conducted by Ms. Spano and the other by the notorious Mr. Kuck. The fourth-grade students prayed to get Ms. Spano, as she had the reputation of being the easy one of the two. Mr. Kuck had the reputation of being somewhat of a drill sergeant. I wasn’t too concerned when I learned I would be in his class because I had always done my homework and reports on time, for fear of getting in trouble with my parents. However, from the very first day of class, it was apparent that Mr. Kuck’s class was NOT going to be easy.
As was the practice in elementary schools, we stayed in the same classroom with the same teacher for most of the day except for lunch, art and music classes, and gym. I had the good fortune to have joined the school band in the fourth grade and was learning to play the trumpet, which allowed me to escape from the class a couple of times a week for an hour of band practice. When we ventured out of our classroom for an assembly or lunch, it was always in columns of two. Our drill sergeant, Mr. Kuck, was always there to keep us in line, literally. To say that Mr. Kuck was strict was an understatement. His physical presence alone was enough to strike fear into even the most wayward of students. He was about six-feet tall and had a thick mustache that extended beyond the borders of his mouth, and a big belly that a tight polo shirt barely restrained. He always wore jeans and sneakers and was never without three things: his pointing stick (which was about the size of a pool cue), his packet of chewing tobacco protruding from the back pocket of his jeans, and his little plastic cup into which he would spit his chewing tobacco all day. I was intimidated by him from day one and wondered what I had done to get this completely unreasonable teacher. He didn't tolerate any misbehavior in class. He would slap his stick loudly on his desk if anyone was not paying attention, and had a loud, booming voice, which scared the living daylights out of me.
One of Mr. Kuck’s favorite tools of discipline was giving anyone who had not done their homework or other such misbehavior a writing assignment, where they had to write out the same phrase, five hundred, one thousand, or even two thousand times, and it would always be due the next day. He demanded neatness in writing and quiet attention during class and was a strict disciplinarian. I realized quickly that any attempt on my part just to get by would have dire consequences in the form of one of those writing assignments that everyone dreaded.
I told him about my dream of becoming an airline pilot, and he told me that my goal could be reached only with a lot of hard work and study. What amazed me the most about this whole situation was that some kids in the class did not do as Mr. Kuck told them! Weren’t they afraid of getting a writing assignment or worse yet, having Mr. Kuck calling their parents? I thought. As for me, I was trapped because I knew that if there were ever any bad reports from my teacher, my parents would take his side. I had no choice but to work harder than I had ever worked before in school.
After the first few weeks of class, Mr. Kuck did something that looking back as an adult, I realize started me on the path towards actually being able to fulfill my potential and achieve my dream of flying. At the time, I felt even further persecuted by this tyrant of a teacher for this unwanted extra attention, with all the extra work it entailed. There were about twenty-five of us in class, and we all came into the classroom one morning to find that our desks had been rearranged. There was the main group of about twenty desks that still faced his, but five desks had been moved near the window, perpendicular to all the other desks, arranged side-by-side. He announced that I, along with four other students, would be sitting in those separate five desks, and that we would henceforth be getting extra assignments. My jaw dropped. The separate group comprised of me, a girl named Erica (on whom I had a little crush), and three other boys: Quaton, Raul, and Quiro. This seemed so unbelievably unfair to the five of us, but the other twenty kids were delighted that they would just be getting the normal level of assignments (which was already much more that Ms. Spano’s class). No amount of protest from the five of us changed this new arrangement, and so we resigned ourselves to being the victims of this unwanted extra attention.
The weeks and months that followed were full of all kinds of extra reading, math assignments and homework that seemed to have no point other than to torture us. Erica and I lived in the same building, with her one floor below me, and we often talked on the phone after school about how mean Mr. Kuck was. I told my parents about what was happening in class, but all they said was that I had to listen to my teacher, and that homework was good for me! They didn’t seem to understand my predicament. As I sat there day after day, doing homework for hours, I dreamt about when I used to be able to watch cartoons or go outside to fly model airplanes.
Spring 1984 rolled around and with it came the season of ultimate torture that all of us had been dreading since the start of the school year: New York State standardized testing. These were given to assess the progress of all students in the fifth grade across the entire state, to determine our standard of reading, writing, and
