We all know that the "Three R's" are Reading, wRiting, and 'Rithmetic. I think the "Fourth R" is Recollection. Education and experience consist of not just what we learn, but also what we remember. It seems that whenever you read the biography of some person who has "made it" or listen to an interview with a Nobel Prize winner, there are always teachers that they will remember who made them excited about learning, or inspired them to search for larger truths.

There are also teachers who are memorable for reasons that are unusual or entertaining. I have to admit that when I think of my school days, I tend to remember these teachers first. I may not remember a thing they actually taught me, but I can immediately recall specific events involving them. A lot people I know agree with me about this.

For example, I have two sisters who are a year apart in age, and they had many of the same teachers while they were growing up. One of their favorites was a nun who taught them in the second grade. Apparently whenever the class would get out of control, she would open the drawer of her desk, take out a fiddle, and start playing! I have no idea what she would play, or if she played well, but it was something they remember to this day.

When my husband was in high school near Pittsburgh, their principal was a nun from Ohio, who spoke with no real trace of any specific regional accent. That is, until she had to have a double mastectomy, when all of a sudden she developed a deep Southern accent. (Medline searches on this syndrome have been completely unsuccessful ...)

In the fourth grade, my teacher was a nun, who was very short and extremely stout. She had a platform in the front of the class where her desk was located, so that she could see the class. One day she was writing on the blackboard, and she must have tripped over her own feet or something, because all of a sudden she fell over backwards! This would have been shocking enough, but then she rolled back and forth twice! The entire class sat in astonished silence for a couple of minutes, and then someone managed to get up and help her back to her feet. (I would like to say this noble gesture was performed by yours truly, but I was already visiting The Land of Inappropriate Responses, if you know what I mean.) I truly don't think it had ever occurred to any of us that such a thing could happen to a teacher in front of a class, it was something we talked about for weeks.

When I was in the sixth grade, we started having different teachers for each subject, instead of a single teacher for the entire day. This experience was interesting in and of itself, but my Math teacher was the one that stood out, because it was the first time I had ever had a male teacher. Looking back, I feel pretty certain that he must have been barely out of college, and not very experienced. I also think he must have not had sisters, because he seemed particularly unnerved by the girls in the class. I don't mean because they would try to get his attention by being cute or acting up, but just because normal things upset him. For example, the boys in the class could burp, cough, or God-knows-what without any reaction on his part. But if one of the girls would blow her nose, he would always say, in a very exasperated tone, "Girls, how many times must I ask you to please not perform your personal toilettes in the class?" Of course, we could not figure out to save our lives what a "personal toilet" (as he pronounced it) was, or what exactly was involved in the performance of one (although Mary Beth Z. said she thought he meant we shouldn't use toilet paper to blow our noses. The rest of us decided that this theory was just too lame). Finally, a very nice female teacher from one of our other classes explained the "toilette" part to us, but even she seemed a little bit skeptical about nose blowing as part of the ritual. I can only hope that he went on to another career, or an all-boys school ...

During my sophomore year in high school, we had a speech teacher who wore roller skates all of the time during class. And I don't mean the boot-style, I mean the kind we had as kids that you tightened with a key around your shoes to skate on the sidewalk! He told us that in order to tell whether or not we were learning "to emote properly, and speak with feeling," he had to be able to move quickly around the classroom. This approach was, to say the least, rather unconventional, and the next year he was replaced by a thin, older man who could barely hear anything.

I must admit that my favorite recollection is my eighth grade Reading teacher. She was a very elderly nun, who was an extremely rigid taskmaster. We lived in fear of her, even though most of us were about a foot taller than she was. Reading class was every day immediately after lunch and believe me, everyone managed to stay awake. One day she came into the classroom, put her notebooks and other materials on her desk, adjusted the window blinds so we wouldn't be distracted watching the students in the lower grades at recess, and then walked over and shut the door. This was the usual routine, so it didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary would happen. We were so wrong. She turned to the class and said, "Children, open your workbooks," and then she proceeded to throw up on the entire front row! Now I knew then, and I know now, that this should not really be something that has entertainment value. But for my money, it is the most memorable and most amusing event in my entire school career. Talk about unexpected! Who knew that teachers, especially nuns, threw up? (Just to let those of you who might be worried know the outcome, Sister was OK. She returned after about twenty minutes and we finished out the class time as usual in another classroom, minus the students in the front row who had all been sent home for the rest of the day).