My third-grade teacher, Mr. J, had just moved up to New York from Florida, where he’d also taught primary school. He had an outdoorsman’s adventurous charisma and the boys loved him. He spoke of the camping and canoeing trips he’d captained with schoolkids in the Okefenokee Swamp in Florida, where they reckoned with man-eating alligators, and camped out in the wild. Only the bravest boys would get to go. When the girls in class complained that only boys were allowed, unseeing of the future, he said, “When the bathrooms stop having boys and girls signs on them, then girls can come on my trips!”
