Mr. Cadbury
I attended a small Quaker school in Germantown, Pennsylvania in a deteriorating neighborhood about six miles northeast of central Philadelphia. My father and his two brothers had attended the same school in the 1930’s, and, remarkably, there were still several teachers from my father’s era still there when I began. I had no idea how good that school was until many years later and I’d had a look at what typically passes for education elsewhere.
Mr. Cadbury stands especially tall in my memory. He was our science teacher from second grade through sixth grade. That’s right. He taught second graders and continued teaching them until they left for middle school in the seventh grade. To the best of my memory, he taught us twice a week, so that would have meant two classes of second graders twice weekly, and so on; or a teaching load of about 20 hours each week. Demanding, I imagine, but possible.
Mr. Cadbury embodied the notion of “avuncular.” He was a bit bearish and a little unkempt; usually wearing a worn tweed jacket over a worn oxford shirt with frayed cuffs, baggy pants and scuffed brown shoes. He had thinning, grey hair wandering about in a restless crowd on his head, and bushy eyebrows swarming above his squinting eyes; bright blue peeking out with great vitality from their lair. He was a bit round, more thick than fat, with strong thick hands whose nails were sometimes darkened with soil.
He was, along with the art and music teachers, the only one with his own room to teach in during our grammar school years. His room was a wonder. My education began simply by stepping across the threshold. It was a small museum of natural history; a sanctuary of wonder set apart from the rest of everything we occupied ourselves with during those days. It was relatively large with three very large windows along one side, which admitted copious sunlight. Every nook and cranny was filled with pleasures and surprises. There were charts on the wall of the planets, of birds of prey, of reptiles, and who knows what else. Between them were many stuffed birds and animals: gulls, hawks, beaver, raccoons with shiny eyes, deer with dull eyes, and below these were aquariums, terrariums with lizards, fish, turtles, mice, rabbits and other critters. Cages held birds he had netted who would visit for a day or two while he banded them and released them. He was a serious ornithologist, a biographical tidbit I only learned years later when he was written up in the paper for his important discovery of a golden eagle somewhere near Philadelphia, a very rare sighting attesting to his astuteness as a birder.
His wife, Mrs. Cadbury, was a warm aunt; firm but entirely safe, who taught one of the third grade classes.
So, entering his classroom, I usually felt some frisson of excitement. Something was bound to happen, something exciting and different. We always had a few minutes to wander about to try to see what might be different from our previous visit. The redwing blackbird in the cage near the window? Maybe the less common bluebird in the next cage? No, it had to be the screech owl in the rear. His room had its old kneehole desk in the front with its papers strewn about giving it a relaxed, disordered feeling. A table in front of the desk would have items of interest we might discuss that day… if we should get to it. Roughly fifteen chairs ringed the table and desk, and after a bit of wandering during which time we might ask him about the diet of the iguana or how many babies rats had at a time, we would take our seats. We were never scolded into those chairs, or never that I recall. We assembled like kids waiting to hear a wonderful story before the lights went out.
Mr. Cadbury’s “core curriculum” consisted entirely of our wandering curiosity. “Well, anything you’ve been wondering about?” he might have asked. A hand or two, or maybe four or five, would shoot up. It was fun to ask him things. “What makes a volcano go off?” Or, “How do birds know where to go when they migrate?” Or, “Can a shark eat a turtle?” And so on without order and without end.
“Wonderful. Yes, these are wonderful questions. Every one of them. We’ll try to discuss them all if we have the time. But first, I want you all to meet someone. She’s very shy so you must be very still.” With that propitious introduction, he would reach his big, soft paw into his tweed coat pocket and bring out a cardinal resting in his palm with its feet poked out through his fingers and appearing quite comfortable.
“I just netted this girl this morning,” he would say, “and I’ll band her shortly and send her along. Then someone in Georgia or Arkansas might catch her down there and we’ll learn where she spends her winters. You can see she’s a girl because of this dusky olive colored dress she’s wearing. Do any of you know what coat her husband wears?” We all did, and raced to share our knowledge.
There then might have been another friend of his: the other pocket might have had a garter snake. There was just no telling what surprises there might be on so many visits. So the natural world was like this? A place of endless wonders, even when we were familiar with them, like the cardinals we had seen a thousand times, but now respected more, and admired more. Now we no longer just saw cardinals, we saw cardinal stories in the trees.
Then we would set off into the best of the class: the questions. There was never any thought, there could be no thought that a question might not be welcome. Every one was. Nor did he seem to think it might matter in the least that we followed some chart, or order that we must impose on ourselves. The order lay imbedded in the material. The world was a place of infinite majesty and our interest in its mysteries was the reason to be there.
Mr. Cadbury was a splendid and gifted teacher, warmly devoted to giving the gifts of his deep fascination with nature to one generation after another. How fortunate I was to have him be a part of my life unconstrained by the current obsessions with core curricula, which ask children to herd their minds into boxes. He sent our minds soaring into the world.
