Audre Lorde

In Audre Lorde's essay, I feel she did a fine job at illustrating each encounter she had with her teachers.  She starts off in Chapter Three from her book Zami, when her first encounter with the school librarian, Mrs. Baker comes about.  Lorde was always finding herself in trouble with her mother for misbehaving quite a bit.  Lorde goes onto say how she thought Mrs. Baker was "just another mile high club woman" but instead welcomed her with a nice soothing calm voice and had offered to read her a story.  After Mrs. Baker had read to her, Lorde took the book tracing the big letters being able to distinguish the difference between them yelling out after saying, "I want to read!"  Lorde tells her readers how till this day she still remembers everyone of the books read to her that day. It was because of Mrs. Baker that influenced Lorde's excitement in wanting to read.  Her mother did the best she could in teaching her how to read and write her name before kindergarten arrived.  Lorde's first day of school wasn't the greatest of all first days that you would usually expect for a kindergartner.  She illustrates how upset and embarrassed her teacher had made her.  The teacher had everyone trace over the first letter of their name in crayon which was a problem for Lorde to do because she was never taught how.  After being threatened by her teacher that her mother was going to be called, she became frustrated with herself, writing her whole name instead of just the first letter.  As you would expect a teacher to be a little more understanding for the student at least trying, it was the opposite for Lorde and was only embarrassed and put down by the teacher.  The teachers reply, "You don't even want to try as your told" said it all and was just a complete put down and made Lorde feel as if she hadn't tried at all when it was clear she did.  After that incident, her mother had decided it was best to enroll her in first grade at the same catholic schools her sister went to.  Sister MPH was in charge of the first grade.  There were quite a few examples that Lorde provided with her encounter on Sister MPH.  From the jest of it you could infer even from the beginning that Sister wasn't the nicest of teachers.  Lorde gave a prime example of what made me feel this way by saying, "It always felt like Sister MPH either hated teaching, or little children."  Makes me feel as if Sister MPH was just down right cruel to Lorde as if she weren't welcome.  Lorde surely didn't have the best of teachers but thanks to Mrs. Baker, she was able to encourage her to want to read and write.