When discussing history (as anything else), my primary source of “inspiration” is not Wikipedia but rather my own memory. I look up Wikipedia to find supporting evidence, however, as it can easily be accessed by anyone who’d want to verify or learn more. And in all this, the “go to figure” in my memories is the history teacher, Georgeasca.

If you’ve read my previous stories about teachers, this is not about the physics teacher from high-school, Iosif Sever Georgescu, nor is about the crazy math teacher from middle school who used to beat up everyone and had an affair with a student’s mother. It’s about the history teacher.

I don’t think I liked history as a kid – it seemed like too much memorization of important dates and not enough thinking. We had a teacher with a Greek profile, meaning she had a big, angled nose and huge, heavy earrings that had caused her ears to elongate. She was somewhat tall and I liked her sense of fashion, it somehow matched the ancient art we’d see in the history manual.

She was very particular about how we were supposed to take notes – on math paper only, writing in landscape orientation, in flowchart / point style, with each point connected by a line to its “mother” idea/year.

She always expected total silence from her class and when she wouldn’t get it, she’d stare at you for a few seconds, to be sure it was you causing it, or to give you a last chance to keep quiet. Then she’d call you to her desk and would hit you with Tyson’s fury. I watched all the other guys in our class having their crania fractured by her huge palms. Her face slaps had a certain cinematic quality. I remember my colleagues walking tense, almost hypnotized, her grabbing their face with one hand, much like I would grab a giant boob, then slapping with the other, on both sides, with large, ample moves. I could see in slow motion how drops of sweat, tears and saliva would fly through the air while the face would get deformed and “reformed” again. My classmate would be left standing, red faced and blinking rapidly until she’d remind them that they need to go back to their place. He’d then be petrified as a wax figurine at Madame Tussaud’s.

Though I hated memorizing, I had difficulties imagining how I would fare in that kind of abuse. I was afraid that I might snap or hit back so I did my best to avoid that situation. I was not a “well-behaved” student (at least, I don’t remember myself as such), but I somehow managed the performance of not getting hit by her, despite all the other boys having experienced it.

Though a bit brutal by today’s standards, she managed to instil discipline in class and the way she forced us to take notes made everything clear and simple. Though I disliked her violent disciplinarian methods, I started to like this process of understanding how much of who we are today was influenced by how others were centuries ago. And I did realize just how good a teacher she was when the other history teacher, whom we called “Mafia”, had to replace “Georgeasca” when she got sick.

Mafia was short, fat and had an annoying, high-pitched voice. It was hard to listen to her without bursting into laughter. And to her defence, perhaps it is hard to teach when there is general hilarity, especially of the kind directed at you. Yet I remember the few classes I spent with her wasted in us laughing and her attempting to connect or talk to a few of us, then leaving upset “like the cowboy on the village” (as the saying goes in Romania).

I’ve met her (G.) years later, in a streetcar, in one of the few situations I was sitting down. She was together with the German teacher, a short, dark, dried, chain smoking but generally convivial and optimistic woman. I wanted to stand up to offer my seat, but they wouldn’t let me, each with a hand firmly implanted on my shoulder. We talked and talked and in the end I felt embarrassed by my sitting down while they were standing, so I lied that I have to get off. Then the conversation died, either because they felt dominated by my height, or because the sexuality I was exuding distracted them beyond what’s needed to keep the appearance of a civilized conversation in a public place.

Let us now move to the ethnogenesis of Romanians (“etnogeneza”), starting with a map question.

Sources / More info: gs-slap