Like the two earlier stories on puppetry, this essay continues an exposition of my experiences in making and using puppets.  Because I enjoyed making them I pushed using them to perform in the background but teaching afforded me the opportunity to use my skills which began after a year at the State Village for Epileptics.  I left there with mixed feelings but I wanted to teach high school history.  But, because such jobs were not to be had I found a job teaching English in Elizabeth in McKinley Jr. High.  This was fortunate for I made friends with the shop teacher who let me use a band-saw to cut pieces of wood of the size I used to create my first two marionettes.  This was a high speed instrument and I threw caution to the winds and in a blaze of energy in spare time I turned out parts that took hours to do using hand tools. Fortunately, I hurt neither myself nor the machine and built up a supply of enough parts to make many marionettes that were between 18 inches and 24 inches high.  This sort of fixed the size of my creations for some time but I was satisfied with the specimens that I put together and used them for the first time in teaching at McKinley.

I had a group of really tough kids whom I charmed into helping me to create a show based on a simple story.  A kid tells his teacher that he knows all he needs to know and is leaving school. The teacher listens sympathetically and tries to persuade the boy to stay in school if he can be shown that he really doesn’t know everything.  This story was based on a story that I heard in a sermon some years before.  The teacher says that there are two boys who decide to go up on the roof and climb down a chimney.  One of the boys comes down and is filthy with soot.  The other arrived at the bottom perfectly clean. Which one, asks the teacher, will go and get himself clean?  The boy thinking he knows everything says it is silly; the boy who is dirty will get himself cleaned up.  The teacher says, but, they are in a fireplace at the bottom of the chimney and it is dark. How will the dirty one know he is dirty?  This stumps the boy so the teacher explains that the clean boy looks at the dirty one and thinks that he, too, must be dirty and then goes off to clean himself.  Oh, says the boy. I see.  But, the teacher asks him how much did he really see? How did two boys go down that same chimney and only one get dirty?

Now, this story is a fast one but it took several months with the kids in my class to learn how to use the marionettes I built specifically for this story and a simple set that had a teacher’s chair, one for the student and the façade of a room with a chimney from the roof to the fireplace inside the room.  For some reason, the task I put the class to worked and while the lesson in the story may have been missed, the class worked hard with each other. We performed the show at an assembly that went well. I had a particularly good year with them.