Her favorite teaching tool - happiness

My mother used to ask, when the phone rang yet again, the kitchen phone, the only one we had, a big black shiny thing, which lived on the kitchen counter, “What more could you possible have to say to each other?’’

We never ran out of things to say. We whispered through classes, chattered through lunch and assemblies, passed notes on the run. And then we went home and talked and talked for hours.

In a world before e-mail and texting there was only talk, and if it had been an Olympic sport we would have shared the gold.

Most of our talk was about boys. Boys in class. Boys down the hall. Boys we imagined we would fall in love with someday. And because we were readers, we obsessed over boys in books.

We met Sergeant Mike Flannigan, a Canadian Mountie, on the pages of “Mrs. Mike.’’ He and his young bride, Katherine Mary, were our mutual obsession. We swooned at every kiss. We sobbed at every tragedy. We talked about love and hardship and memorized long earnest passages of heart-wrenching prose, then started writing our own sad love stories, which we read to each other on the phone at night.

And then suddenly, high school was over and college began, and though we went to the same place, we weren’t in the same place anymore. Somehow we’d drifted apart.

We both graduated from Bridgewater State College with teaching degrees. I taught for one year.

My friend Elaine Rooney began her 42d year teaching on Wednesday.

We picked up our lost friendship a while ago. A phone call here. A dinner there, though sometimes years go by between them.

It doesn’t matter. The foundation we laid when we were young is strong.

I called her last week because last year over dinner, she swore she was definitely going to retire. “I mean it,’’ she said.

But then she had started talking about her third-graders and what they were reading and learning and doing and how much fun they were and how each class every year is so different, but the same, too.

“I love the kids. I love every part of my job. I’m so lucky,’’ she said, smiling her big happy smile, and I knew and she knew, too, that retirement was not in her future.

So when I phoned her last week and asked, “Elaine? Did you retire?’’ and she laughed, I wasn’t surprised. “But this is definitely my last year, really. I swear. I’ve even been throwing things out.’’

And buying things, too. She set up her classroom and stocked up on pencils and rulers and paper and notebooks. Plus books and toys and games that her kids can buy with their classroom “funny money,’’ which they earn by doing their work and getting good grades. “It’s an incentive. They’re like adults. They’re always adding up their money.’’

She has 23 children this year. Her biggest class was 28, her smallest 17. She has taught nearly 1,000 third- and fourth-graders since she started student teaching at Highland Elementary School in Braintree on April Fools’ Day, 1968.

But she is not even close to worn out. “I look forward to getting up every day. I love my kids. I love my classroom.’’ And with a grin you could hear in her words, she added, “I love teaching so much that I always say I’d pay them to let me do it.’’

“Happy, successful and safe. That’s what children should feel when they’re in a classroom,’’ she said.

This is her imperative. This is what she knows from 42 years of teaching: “You can educate a happy child.’’

But what it begins with is a happy teacher.

Beverly Beckham can be reached at bevbeckham@aol.com.