Bill of Rights Bulmer

Article I - Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Her name was Agnes Bulmer but we affectionately called her “Bill of Rights Bulmer.” She was my sixth grade teacher at St. Thomas the Apostle School. By all counts, she was a very good math teacher and probably a really nice person – unless you were a sixth grade student.
Sixth grade was a very big year at St. Thomas. The sixth, seventh and eighth grades were all located on the top floor of the old school. Kids rarely visited the top floor unless they were collecting mission money or attending detention. I visited more often for detention.
My feet didn’t touch the floor at the desks in the detention room and the textbooks were a lot thicker than ours. That was the extent of my third floor memories until I arrived in Mrs. Bulmer’s room in 1967.

Mrs. Bulmer was an unknown to us. She came to St. Thomas that year after a long career with the public schools. We had no rumors or inside information from older brothers and sisters. We would just have to break her in like we did Sister Theresa in fifth grade.

Sister Theresa had issues with classroom management as we say in the business and ended up leaving the convent altogether and getting married. We took full credit for her nun meltdown but I would imagine her fiancé was a bigger factor. Like a relief pitcher trying to finish out a losing game, Mrs. Nicholas took over the class for the last 2 months of school. It’s possible she became a nun after a few months with us.

So we arrived at Mrs. Bulmer’s sixth grade door with an attitude. Her reaction to our antics was calm and efficient. In that first week, four of us had a giggling fit that could not stop. She calmly wrote our names on the board and said she had a special assignment for our misbehavior.
We were told to write out the Bill of Rights and turn it in the next morning. It took about 45 minutes that night to write it out by hand which was annoying but not deadly for a punishment.
For one reason or another (mostly talking), my name appeared on the board again and again. I accepted my fate and wrote copy after copy of the Bill of Rights like a monastic monk.
Mrs. Bulmer rarely raised her voice and most kids learned to keep their names off of the Bill of Rights list. Michael Rosetti even erased the whole list once but she conveniently had it jotted down in her teacher book. She assigned the Bill of Rights to the whole class on several occasions and a collective groan came over the class.

One day I was filled with patriot pride and I challenged Mrs. Bulmer saying that we had a right to exercise our free speech. It said so right in the Bill of Rights and I was practically a constitutional scholar by now. Her response was to make me write the referenced document 5 times.

It got so bad that year, that I memorized the ten articles. I would write them in advance on pages in the back of my theme tablet and turn them in as needed. In a moment of stupidity, I handed her one moments after she assigned it just to get a laugh. The class laughed at me instead as I got another five assigned.

I wrote the darned Bill of Rights about 63 times that year according to the check marks on my notebook cover. I could have supplied the entire Continental Congress with copies two hundred years earlier.

I am ashamed that I can’t remember all of my grammar school teachers but I’ll never forget Agnes Bulmer and I’ll never forget the Bill of Rights.

The Flipside - May 2009