The Tester

In my first five years of elementary school, I can recall two great moments of learning. Both happened in fifth grade, under the tyrannical rule of Sr. Mary Clement. The first incident occurred on what began as a normal, uneventful school day. And then…

For some reason, Sr. Clement assigned us a project: to find something out about some adult’s job and report on it. It’s the only project I ever remember in grade school, in which homework always consisted of memorizing stuff or writing out stuff that was to be memorized. This was different, and I recall being motivated by it, a state no grade school teacher had yet induced in me.

I sought out the coolest adult I knew, my sister’s husband Dick. Dick was the first to enter my family of eight through marriage. He was not Italian, and he was tall. He was unfailingly kind to my little brother Art and me. All these attributes made him a huge, strange hero to me. He had also served a hitch in the Navy, where my older brother then languished, and he sported on his shoulder a tattoo of a sailing vessel, so the man was also incredibly exotic, tattoos being otherwise utterly unknown to me.

So, of course, I consulted Dick about his job. I knew it would be as fascinating, adventurous, and splendid as everything else about him. I was right.

“I’m a Tester,” he informed me.

I knew he worked for GE, but a Tester, whoa. “What do you test?” I asked.

“I test for breaks in electrical wiring,” he said.

“How?” I was enthralled. I didn’t know wires had breaks. I didn’t actually know what he was talking about. Dick sensed my cluelessness and prepared a demo.

He took a D battery out of one end of a flashlight and removed the little bulb from the opposite end. He acquired two small pieces of wire, hooked them up to the battery, and showed me how, by touching them together, the bulb would magically light up. He taped everything onto a piece of cardboard, then he taped the wires with insulating tape to preclude electric shock.

He then explained how one could test a wire with this contraption by simply spreading the two ends along a length of the wire. If the bulb lit up, that section of the wire was fine, and one moved the two testing wires down to the next length of wire. If the bulb failed to light up, the wire was faulty at that precise point. It could then be fixed.

For years after that there existed no more exciting job than Tester.

On the due date, I brought my testing contraption to school. I may have been the only one whose presentation included a demonstration. I remember that, as soon as I stood before the class, I felt outre, weirdly different from everyone else. But I persevered.

I dutifully explained the job of Tester, touching the ends of the wires together to illuminate the bulb, holding the ends apart and pretending to slide them along an imaginary length of wire until the bulb went out, at which time the Tester would know the wire had a break in it.

Sr. Clement looked at me in what seemed an ominous fashion. “Barone,” she said. “Go to Sr. Deshantall’s eighth grade class and tell Sister you’d like to give the class this report.”

I was horrified. Sr. Clement was stern and violent, but I never dreamed she would stoop to such pure cruelty. She meant for me to be mocked and jeered by the eighth graders. What other explanation could there be for such a bizarre instruction?

I arrived at the room of the eighth grade boys, knocked, entered, and tiptoed up to Sr. Deshantall. I told her that I was supposed to tell her class about my project. She said go ahead. I stepped in front of the group of over 40 boys, much bigger and much older than I, and got a few words out before breaking down sobbing. Sr. Clement’s punishment was effective.

Sister Deshantall called me to her desk and hugged me. I remember my tears staining her large white wimple. I remember, in the throes of great angst, worrying that I was messing up her wimple. She was mystified by my weeping. When I somehow explained that I believed this was a punishment for having such a lousy project, she expressed extreme disbelief and assured me that this was a reward for a terrific project.

She took me back to my own classroom, conferred with Sr. Clement, and left. Sr. Clement approached me ominously and chastised me for not knowing that she was rewarding me for an excellent project.

I see now that it was an excellent project, better by far than anything my classmates came up with. Dick wouldn’t let me down and he didn’t. What I did was, I began to learn how to decide for myself what was a bad idea, a good idea, or a great idea. That’s an important event, the moment we construct a useful yardstick to measure the value of the projects we choose to undertake.