If you have to spend most of your Saturday in class, cooped up in the small basement room of Union Avenue Baptist Church which houses the Memphis Teacher Residency World Headquarters, there is no better professor with whom to be cooped up than Dr. Patti Ray.
Dr. Patti Ray is an amazing woman. She's a petite, brunette powerhouse of energy. The woman gets things done. She's the Headmistress at a prestigious private girls' school here in Memphis. In addition to being Headmistress, she teaches a class of seniors at St. Mary's, is an adjunct professor at Union University (she teaches classes like ours on Thursdays and Saturdays while her husband stays home and watches football), and a devoted grandmother. Though she clearly gets things done, she has an unbelievably relaxed presence in the classroom.
She peppers her lectures with an assortment of fascinating personal stories. As she explains the concept of authentic assessment (assessing your students with real-world tasks that have an audience and a meaning), she talks about how her history class of 8th graders found out the location of an important local historical site by conducting their own investigation, presented it to the city council, petitioned to make their own sign for the site, and erected a sign honoring the historical site that is there to this day. Of course, as aspiring teachers, our jaws drop, we collectively ask if she's had a movie made about her (we're thinking something along the lines of Freedom Writers or the Ron Clark Story), and we stare at each other in amazement, wishing that we could be like Patricia Ray. Later, she tells us about the time a student pulled a gun on her. She's never been afraid of students, so she does not see any reason to be afraid of that one, though she admits the experience was a bit unnerving. She talks of the student who was overage for grade but needed a high school history class to graduate. She tutored him day after day, until he was finally caught up. Just before it was time to take the final, her student was arrested and put in jail for armed robbery. He had a record of felonies and was over 21, so there was no chance of him getting out. Patricia Ray marched into the prison with a copy of her history exam and sat in a private room to proctor the exam so her student could graduate from high school. And he did. Again, our jaws drop.
Aside from being an outstanding teacher, Dr. Ray is also a bit accident prone. Today she told us of how she smashed her hand in the garage door, yanked it out, and decided to go on to work. Thankfully, her son called her on the phone, found out what happened, and ordered her back home where he met her and promptly drove her to the emergency room. "I was in shock. I just couldn't feel it, you know, so I thought it was no big deal. Being the good mother that I am, of course I listened to my son. And he was right, you know."
We were laughing uncontrollably at her account of the incident and description of what her hand looked like afterwards: "I looked like Edward Scissorhands you know, with all of these fingers just smashed flat. And that is why I can't bend my fingers all the way down. Just this far."
The finger-smashing story was followed by a report of an electrocution at the age of 7. Little Patti was using a lamp when the bulb went out. She needed some light, so she thought she would change the bulb. She walked over to another lamp ("which had a philodendron growing in the base of it, I don't know why") and started to unscrew the bulb. Somehow in the process, her finger slipped into the socket where the bulb should be. "I was being electrocuted, that's what. My father threw a book at the lamp to break the connection, but by that time I couldn't feel my finger. I was screaming. My mother thought it was something else. Earlier I had been bending over a candle, so she thought my hair was on fire. But really I was being electrocuted. So they took me to the emergency room. Of course I was missing all the skin on my finger where it had just been burnt off, you know. So the Dr. thought that if he sewed my finger inside my stomach, the skin would regenerate itself. It was 1954 you know. They didn't understand much back in those days. So they just sewed my finger inside my stomach. Well not my stomach, but near my stomach. Just sewed it under the skin on my abdomen so I was stuck like this. For 2 months you know. That's a long time for a 7 year old to be in the hospital with her finger sewed into her stomach. But my priest would send little gifts, flowers, presents, cards, and books every day, and sign them "From your secret admirer. I was so excited about having a secret admirer. Of course at the end of 6 weeks they took my finger out of my stomach and of course the skin had not grown back so they had to do a skin graft. They didn't know much back then. Can you imagine. But that's when I started learning to use my right hand to write with. So of course that caused all kind of connections in the Corpus Callosum, you know."
I don't like Saturday classes, but I like Dr. Ray.
