by Vonda J. Sines

Created on: April 01, 2008

The first time I saw her, she looked straight out of "Macbeth". She had red hair leaning toward a maroon shade and a cackle straight out of a witch's manual.

In 1965, Evelyn Falk was the terror of my high school. She taught only Advanced Placement English, grades 11 and 12. This meant that if you survived the first year, you got her again the next one. What made being her student so daunting was that all AP classes were double periods, so you had to give up a study hall for each one of them.

The workload described on the first day of class was terrifying. A couple of her former students wandered into the classroom before they headed off for college. This was puzzling to all of us because we wondered why they would subject themselves one day past high school graduation to such a taskmaster. She lined up her surprise visitors at the front of the room and asked each of them to announce how they had done on the AP English test the preceding spring. All of them grinned from ear to ear.

By October of my junior year, I felt sorry for Mrs. Falk. My mother, an elementary school teacher, insisted the other educators in the city school system thought she was just plain nuts and downright weird. Parents complained that she assigned hours of homework each night, so their kids never had a life. She was more or less the laughing stock of my Midwestern high school.

By the December holiday break, I wouldn't have traded her for any other teacher in the school system. By inclination and talent, she was a painter. Students earned points for papers, classroom participation, mock "College Bowl" competitions in the classroom, and general creativity. Her assignments were just short of impossible, but what a sense of achievement we had when she praised the results.

Her English curriculum was probably way off course from what the school board approved. But it was a tougher than anything I encountered in college. She encouraged us to use the libraries at two area colleges for research and to purchase reference books in their bookstores. I skipped a huge home football game in order to ransack the public library to find out the source of an obscure Shakespearean quote as a challenge.

Points got you far more than grades. The top three students in each class section earned various prizes each grading period. The most prestigious was one of her paintings. Typical other awards included rare books or a free museum pass.

She was not particularly focused when teaching. She began a unit on Plato, stated

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