A scary story on the first day of school

I'm still on the beginning of sixth grade. I knew this incident would deserve its own separate post.

I had music for my fourth period class. The teacher appeared to be a rather stern woman at first. (She was actually rather friendly once you got to know her.) She started our class by talking about the importance of fire drills. This had already been discussed during our homeroom class in first period, but she felt like she could get the point across better than the other teachers.

She told us a story about what happened when she was a little girl. I wound up hearing this story twice because she decided to tell it again when I had her in the eighth grade for the choir class.

It starts out with her in grade school. Back then, girls were not allowed to wear pants. They could only wear skirts. During fire drills, everyone on the second floor was required to enter a chute that they would ride like a slide down to the ground outside. While the boys enjoyed this, it was a problem for girls because they had to fuss with their skirts so they could slide down properly.

One day, the fire drill alarm went off. She and a friend decided they didn't want to go down the chute, so they hid behind a cabinet and waited for the class to return. A few minutes later, her teacher appeared and called out to her. She poked her head out. The teacher told her she needed to come out. She slowly started walking toward her teacher, literally dragging her feet. She did not say anything about the other student still in the classroom. She said that as soon as she and her teacher left the room, the ceiling came crashing down in flames and killed her friend. She ends the story by saying that every night, she can still hear her friend screaming.

She likely told this story at least ten times each year before she started teaching choir at the junior and high schools. The music class was only one semester long. During the other semester, we took science. Those who took science during the first semester would then take music. I don't know how long she had been teaching before that, but it means that at least 250 kids each year had to listen to that story.

While I found it harrowing at the time, it was many, many years later that I began to realize some of the holes in this story and started wondering if it actually happened, or at the very least, was something for which she was mistakenly taking all the blame.

Here's how I see things playing out after the class had left the room: The teacher is able to get everyone through the chute. After arriving outside, the principal goes around to all the teachers and quietly informs them that the school is actually on fire. They just made it seem like a drill to keep the students from panicking. The principal tells the teachers they need to make sure they got all the students out safely. The teacher, if I remember correctly, is female. She does a quick check and realizes at least one student is missing and she goes back inside to retrieve her.

Here's my first problem: Would they actually let a teacher, a female teacher, back inside a burning building? Even if the fire department was not there yet, I'm certain the principal would have posted some staff at the entrances to make sure no one went back in.

This brings me to my second problem: Why did the teacher not seem to know that the other student was missing and likely hiding in the classroom as well? Once she found one of the missing girls, you'd think she'd ask if the other girl was there. It's possible she went through the roll and once she found that one student was not around, she stopped taking roll right there and took off to find her.

My third problem: If the teacher knew that the building was on fire, why didn't she just scream, "We have to get out of here right now! The school is really on fire!" especially when the girl was dragging her feet? I guess it's possible that the teacher herself may not have actually made it outside, thus preventing her from learning the truth about the fire, but it almost makes more sense that if she thought it was a drill and knowing how the girls felt about going down the chute, she would have just let it go and discipline them later.

At the very least, my music teacher should not be shouldering the emotional burden for the death of that other little girl.

My teacher took a leave of absence after having a baby a few years later and never returned. I saw her again when I was in college and she came to see a production of "HMS Pinafore" that I was in. She was surprised to see my name in the program and asked to see me after. I didn't recognize her at first because her hair was a different color. I wished that I'd had questions about the fire drill story at that time because I know I would have asked her about it. Now, I guess I'll never know.