Letters from Marcy #21: 5 May 1966
In which Marcy takes the AGRE in Education, and is amused/annoyed by it.
Another time jump here, from January to May; this letter is near the end of her time at Antioch.
She appears to have been teaching at this point, but I’m a little unclear on what/where she was teaching; I think it was at the Antioch School, the lab school for faculty kids, but I’m not certain.
[pencil: 5/5/66?]
Heigh-ho
Thanks for the check and the sesame seed candy et al---had
dinner with Cathy and Elaine on Sunday and took the candy
with; twas most enjoyed. This teacher business in a small
friendly town is really alright; you keep getting the most
sumptuous dinner invitations. Tonight was invited to the
house of one of the girls in the class I'm presently in, a
family that eats most 'stremely well, and a mother who talks
most 'stremely incessantly, and a lovely long bike ride back
to work off some of the excess. Druther have x Cathy and
Elaine for friends, and do things with them, than have kids
invite me to have dinner with their parents.....guess if I
were living in the dorm I'd appreciate it more.
The floor is covered with papers, and I'm really somewhat
shambled, having just produced a two-page précis of what's
supposed to develop into a 15-pages-at-least paper on my
philosophy of education. The reverse is page two of mine,
have many extras as the ditto machine kind of got carried
away....will send a page one if I have any left, have no
extras as the ditto machine got carried away in the opposite
direction.
Reading about 90 million books for creativity paper, but
have reached a plateau of sorts and am at a temporary
standstill, which is kind of depressing, but already
beginning to be over. this is my senior project, and what it
will be like a month from now I have no idea.....but, god,
only a month to do it, eek, help. Think I'll go crawl into
my footlocker and close the lid.--the essence of non-
xxxxxxxxxxx creative activity--????
Those godawful allergy pills really came close to ruining
me. The plimasins are fine, but I took the first of the red
ones (histadyl?) on friday night, and another on Saturday
morning, went to class, and had an agonizing headache (not
the usual painful variety but just totally unpleasant and
repulsive) and felt like I'd been forced to stay awake for
about six days straight, finally came home and began to get
the idea that someone had raked over my psyche with a steel
hasp, and everything was unbearably ugly and terrible.
finally, after about half an hour of that, I curled up in a
little ball, and slept for what turned out to be 15 minutes.
when I woke up I was fine. Haven't xxxx felt like repeating
to see if it really was the pill or not, but I guess if
there's nothing else new I'll go back to ambodryl for a
while, now that I haven't taken any for over a week. if you
could like send some.... also, could use another bottle of
wetting solution, and one of the soaking sol. too,---ah, and
one more thing: stocking cost about a dollar a pair here,
and don't wear near' as well as the ones from Gold's--which
I've just about used up, as I wear them nearly every day,
and Antioch school demands a lot more in x the way of active
participation from its x teachers than Mills Lawn did. Like
I'm expected to get up and move around and act like I'm
alive, not a critter behind a desk or xxxxx safely out of
touch at the front of the room. Which is the way it ought to
be, for kids as well as teachers, but it's certainly harder
on stockings. So if you get ambitious, you could pick up 6
pair of size x 10 seamless mesh cinnamin, I think (how do
you spell cinnamin?), even though it may look awfully dark
to you. cinnamon? oh, well, nutmeg-colored.
AGRE's were this afternoon. These are advanced graduate
record exams, which is a long way of saying college boards
for seniors. The aptitude part is what we take as a matter
of course for our Level II exam, which means that when you
pass that you can go on to take senior-type courses,
high-number, low-population seminar classes, etc. (by number
I mean course # in catalogue, indicated degree of
advancedness, supposedly.) Took them nearly two years ago,
got all (or mostly) H's, as I recall (= high), xxxxx
testifies not that I'm smart but that girls high was a good
training center for test-taking. The ones today were
achievement, meaning on specific subject matter: you take
the one for your field. Suzy says the history ones were very
difficult, I've heard that the sociology exam was ruinously
impossible, but the education exam was so totally ridiculous
and irrelevant and stupid I can't begin to tell you. They
administer the test in one big room, with all the people in
one area sitting near each other, and we all seemed to be
working at roughly the same rate, and occasionally a giggle
would sweep over the whole group at something more xxxxxx
patently absurd or unanswerable than usual. Trying to be
objective about something as personal as teaching means you
can ask two kinds of questions: what was so-and-so's theory
of education, and what do you call this or that aspect of
test-scoring. They did ask a lot of other questions, all of
which were either xxxx stupid or meaningless, and the whole
thing x was SO easy as to be xxx a joke. I took a nap in the
middle, managed to eat an orange, chew two packs of gum, and
go through about a dozen hard candies (we all come prepared
for this kind of thing by now) and still be finished 40
minutes before the time limit. what nonsense!
Carolyn Effros (formerly Jacobson) and her husband passed
through here last week en route to Chicago. They seem to be
doing extremely well together, which is mildly surprising
and altogether great, and it was really good to see them
again.
Regards to people,
[handwritten: love, Marcia]
Postmark: May 5, 1966, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Handwritten: “Rec’d this 5/7” and “Ans. this 5/19” and “Get from Iz — Ambodryls, wetting solution, soaking solution, any brand name. Stocking’s, 6 pr—size 10, seamless mesh, cinnamon } sent to 5/19/66”