In her prime.

My brother described somebody as being "dumb as a mud fence." It had been years since I'd heard that phrase and it had a fun, folksy ring to it, so I jotted it down for later use as an example of a simile in the writing class that I taught. I read it aloud to my students but no one understood. I suggested that they could be excused since few of them in this inner-city university had ever seen a mud fence.

One young man let out a laugh. He said, with self-effacement, "Maybe we don't get it because we are all dumb as a mud fence."

"No one here is really dumb," I said, poised to launch into my everyone-is-good-at-something pep talk. But this young man--who wore his cap backwards, which he said made sense since he was dyslexic--stopped me in my tracks.

"No, it's cool, that's why I'm here. I'm dumb. And I'm here for you to fix my dumbness. Like when you go to the hospital to fix a tumor or a hernia. You go to college to fix being dumb."

"I guess that makes me the doctor," I said.

"Just don't ask me to turn my head and cough," he said. While everyone laughed, I was thinking of his analogy (if he didn't get the simile, at least he made up for it), and I recalled another comparison. The noted author and writing instructor William Zinsser sees writing teachers as social workers because they're trying to reverse the habits of students whose literacy problems are deep-rooted and whose lives are entrenched in a quickblinking imagistic society that less and less values reading and writing. Zinsser asks, "Why would anyone in his right mind want to be a writing teacher? The answer is that writing teachers aren't altogether in their right mind. They are in one of the caring professions, no more sane in their allotment of time and energy than the social worker".

This calls to mind a rather overly zealous writing teacher I recently encountered. She taught an early morning class next to mine. She didn't exactly love teaching but loved herself for being a teacher. The world, like Gershwin's Rockies and Gibraltar, would tumble and crumble were it not for her efforts.

One morning, in the hallway, I was shaking bits of chalk like dice. Guessing I was a fellow teacher, she introduced herself. "I'm Mizz Knotts Hyphen Marshall."

"Nice to meet you. Another day in the jungle, eh?" I said.

Knotts Hyphen Marshall set me straight. "Another day in heaven, you mean. This work can be burdensome, but oh, what a velvet yoke upon our shoulders."

Her eyes locked into mine. Ms. Knotts Hyphen Marshall knew all about effective communication (she made charts on the board demonstrating Effective Communication, with circles and arrows). I could tell she wanted to talk teacher-to-teacher.

I took a quick peek into my classroom, then joked, "Let's keep it down. It'd be a shame to wake them."

She was open-mouthed stunned.

"It'd be a shame not to open their eyes, She said with Arthurian majesty. (Bea Arthurian, for she had a deep voice. "We have a responsibility to these kids. Often we're the only ones they can confide in."

Wonderful, I thought. To have as your only confidante a guy who's looking for comma splices and spelling mistakes. That's like calling an ambulance, then bragging that you have a date with a paramedic.

"I hug my students," she said, "because in this dehumanizing world, they cannot afford to forget that they are human. I substituted at an inner-city school where they rebelled against me. They hated me. They hated me because I cared. They didn't understand that adults could respect them and find worth in them. They didn't understand that learning is linked to love."

"Say, that patchouli becomes you."

"Thank you. I hope it's not overpowering."

"No," I said, but she could've opened a metaphysical bookshop right there.

"Good. I don't want my essence to intrude upon my students' focus. Because it's all for the kids, all for the kids." Ms. Knotts Hyphen Marshall looked past me. "I was threatened by students who later hugged me." She was one thumb up the bat on me. "I remember a young woman named Julie, whose father died two weeks before the semester began. She sat in her chair, hating me, rating school, hating the world. And yes--hating herself. She came to my office, bursting with hostility. She said, 'My father is dead and you're alive and that's not fair."'

Though I didn't know the man, I didn't think it was fair either.

"Well, I just hugged Julie. She resisted at first, but I persisted. Soon poor Julie was hugging me back. Oh, how we both wept. She wrote a paper about me. There were some wonderful ideas in it, but she insisted upon calling me Miss, which I had a lot of trouble with. So after three warnings I had her transferred to another class."

"Is that so?

The clock struck eight. We went into our rooms to teach. I was winded by my exchange. My sloe-eyed students groaned and sluggishly opened their books. I asked, "Did you ever talk to someone who made you feel dumb as a mud fence?"

One kid in the corner who had grown up on a farm smiled and nodded. I felt like giving him a hug, but on second thought, he was doing just fine without one.

Mark Morelli a free-lance writer from River Edge, New Jersey, is the editor of PAH!, a newsletter of humor and commentary.