Monday, December 3, 2012

Where I Come From, Part One

I think I have this bad habit of not telling people how much they mean to me until it's too late.  Yesterday, when I heard about Ms. Sitler's death, it got me thinking about all the really excellent teachers I've had the privilege and honor to have learned from over the years.  They all had something to teach me, and I wouldn't be who I am today without them.  I think that they ought to know.

I went to Northern Potter Children's School as a kid.  I started out in the Harrison Valley Elementary School, but by the time I started kindergarten, everybody knew we were headed for the Hill the following year.  But while I was in the 'Valley, I had a kindergarten teacher named Mrs. Eckenrode.  I started out a little ambivalent about kindergarten.  I wanted to stay home and watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers with Mom, and go up to Aunt Flossie and Uncle Al's.  I didn't want to be in kindergarten.  Mrs. Eckenrode suggested to my mom that she pack my lunch, and that might help with my homesickness.  And it did.  It worked like a charm. 

Besides teaching me the basics, and introducing me to the characters in The Alphabet (I remember Mr. G strung his g-g-g-gum ALLLLLLL over Mrs. Eckenrode's chair, and the blackboard, and her desk!  That stinker, Mr. G!  And Mr. X was a Man of Mystery!), Mrs. Eckenrode taught me a valuable lesson: to be neat and to listen to and follow directions.  The first marking period of kindergarten, I got two "Ns" on my report card.  Our grades then were E, S, and N.  E was the best, S was satisfactory, and N was "needs improvement," which was code for "you failed!"  I got the only two Ns of my academic career that first 9 weeks in Grade K.  One was for neatness and the other was for listening to and following directions, or not being neat or listening to and following directions as the case may be.  There were so many things I learned in kindergarten, and Mrs. Eckenrode was The Best kindergarten teacher I could have imagined.  But that thing about neatness and listening to and following directions has especially stuck with me my whole life.  Every so often, I need to remind myself just where I stand in those departments, because none of that comes naturally to me.

Mrs. Duell was my first grade teacher.  She was a very nice, very religious lady.  When I was in school, they still didn't haul you away for praying in school, and as first graders, we had Devotions, first thing every morning.  I don't think any of us really understood Devotions, but I still don't think it was a bad thing.  But that's not what stuck with me from Mrs. Duell.  At the end of First Grade, Mrs. Duell had a sleepover for all the girls in our class, at her house.  Her house was pretty neat.  There was a loft where we were all to sleep, and there was a pond with an island in it!  We rowed in the rowboat over to the island and sang songs, and then went back to the house for the sleepover. 

Don't you know I was the nerd who came shuffling downstairs well after everybody else had gone to sleep?  Mr. and Mrs. Duell were in their jammies, enjoying the quiet, and the Little Wynick Girl was there in tears, begging to go home.  *cringing*  Mrs. Duell said I could go home if I wanted to, but I ought to have a glass of warm milk and a sit-down first.  I sat there at the table with her and Mr. Duell, drinking my warm milk.  By the bottom of the glass, I figured I could stick it out until morning.  And I did.  And to this day, when I'm having a hard time getting to sleep, I go downstairs, pour a glass of milk, heat it up, and have a sit-down while I drink it.  It doesn't make everything better, but it does make it a little easier to get through until the morning.

Mr. Wilcox was my second grade teacher, but by this time, we really started switching classes for different subjects, so I saw all the second grade teachers.  Mr. Wilcox taught us that Bloomsburg is the only actual town in Pennsylvania.  The other places that we call "towns" are really boroughs, villages, or cities, but Bloomsburg is the only incorporated town.  I've always remembered that, and if any of my friends get on a quiz show, and that's the answer, I'll be your phone-a-friend lifeline and tell you that.  In Mrs. Ransom's language and spelling class that year, we had to do a project where we invented a product to be sold in grocery stores.  My product was Zowies, a breakfast cereal featuring a blow-up flying saucer in the package, that you could really get in and fly around in!  In Ms. Cowburn's reading class, she sat me at a desk by myself, because I was very social, apparently.  But I also got to do a lot of independent reading, from the box of SRAs she kept on the counter.  I started with the red ones and finished the year reading the ones with the silver accents.  This was a big deal, I'm told.

In third grade, I was once again placed at a desk all by myself, right in front of my teacher, Mrs. Torrey's desk, and right behind David Wetmore's individual desk.  I don't know how it was that David Wetmore and I both had to sit by ourselves in the third grade (I was probably overly social and a disruption to others, but I don't remember David being so), but it's okay, because at least I got a window seat.  Mrs. Torrey's classroom was a lot of fun.  In social studies that year, we studied about a girl named Lisa and her family, who were traveling across the country, I believe.  We learned that the basics you need to live are food, clothing, shelter, and water, and my friend Sara would always include "and love!" in her list of essentials.  We had a "Career Day," where I dressed up as a fashion designer (I was a fashion designer, even though Nicky Gray said I was a contractor) and Sara dressed up as the President of the United States.  I told Mrs. Torrey that when I made a million dollars, designing fashions, I'd give her half.  Sara told her that when she was President of the United States of America, she'd have her come stay in the Lincoln Bedroom.  Mrs. Torrey had Sara and me each write her a letter saying so, and she still hasn't forgotten, to this day.  So I guess Sara and I better get crackalackin' on making good  our promises to our third-grade teacher! 

Mrs. Reed was another third grade teacher.  I was in her class for reading.  She taught me how to answer a reading comprehension question.  She taught me how to be specific when I wrote.  In the third grade!  I cannot stress enough how important a skill it is to know how to answer a question.  Seriously.  Think about it!  And finally Mrs. Smith.  I'm going to put Mrs. Smith on hold for right now, as she was also my fifth grade teacher, and that's where I knew her better.

Now, in fourth grade, our little lives were shaken up.  We went from having three classes of us to having just two.  It isn't that a bunch of people suddenly vacated our class, but they just split us down the middle instead of in thirds.  And besides moving to The Intermediate Wing of the school, we also changed classrooms and teachers for nearly every class, just like high schoolers did.  This probably accounts for why I never liked those long Tuesday-Thursday classes in college.  After the first half, I was ready to get up and move to a different room!

But in fourth grade, Mrs. Checkett and Mrs. Wagner were our teachers.  Mrs. Checkett had been in the Peace Corps in Barbados, so she always had the best stories to tell.  She taught us how to wind our hair up like the girls in Barbados would, in a scarf, and she told us about not appreciating the danger of a hurricane, thinking it was a big party as they taped up their windows and filled water jugs.  She had a lottery every Friday, and as long as you stayed in line and didn't tip in your chair or speak out of turn, you got a lottery ticket.  If you won, you got to pick out of her prize box.  She knew how to motivate a bunch of kids, I'll tell you what!  And she traveled a lot, so we fourth graders got to travel vicariously through her.  The year I was in fourth grade, she went to Brazil over Christmas and sent us all postcards, and when she got back, she regaled us with stories of the giant plane she rode on to Rio.  It's safe to say most of us had never been on a plane at all, let alone a giant one!  Wow!

Mrs. Wagner was one of those super-nice teachers who was always dressed very well.  Blouse, jacket, and skirt.  In her class, I was always winding up staying inside for recess for being overly chatty.  Ummm.  Aren't I seeing a pattern here!  But she ran a club- our school had "Clubs" time on Thursday afternoons and later on Friday afternoons for the intermediate kids.  We all had to pick a club to join, and it changed every 9 weeks.  For one nine-week period when I was in fifth grade, I was in Mrs. Wagner's "Health and Beauty" club.  I learned that I'm an "autumn" (eeeeeeewwwwwwww, look!  April has to wear olive green!- now one of my favorite colors!) and I also learned the right way to file my nails and apply nail polish.  Mrs. Wagner also taught me how to put makeup on.  Excepting that time in junior high when I thought it was cool to put hot pink eyeshadow in my eyebrows, I don't think Mrs. Wagner would be embarrassed to admit that I'm an alumna of her Health and Beauty Club.  And I don't think it's a shallow thing, to teach ten-year-old girls how to dress and groom themselves.  As much as we'd like to deny it, we're judged by our appearance in this world.  I'm not even talking about our looks, but how we present ourselves, and how we work with what we've got.  I'm really thankful for Mrs. Wagner and her Health and Beauty Club, because without her, I'm convinced that I would have gone goth years ago and never come back.

Also speaking of clubs, Miss VanDusen's clubs were always my favorite ones to get. I think I joined her clubs more than I was in anyone else's club.  She ran Ceramics Club sometimes, and a Paper Jewelry Club, where we made jewelry from this paper-like material that's a lot like what casts are made from, and we'd paint and spray them.  Basketweaving was one of my favorite clubs to join, when Miss VanDusen offered it.  I always thought it was so cool to start the 9 weeks out with just this wooden base and a bunch of vine, and then finish out the time with a whole entire basket!  I was also in Miss VanDusen's math class for a while.  Multiplication.  Oh, good lord.  It was torture.  The kind where you'd have to multiply some big number by some other big number.  I was sure that these big multiplications would give me an aneurysm.  I did.  I looked up "aneurysm" in the medical encyclopedia in the library (Mrs. Blanchard's realm!) and was convinced that's what I was going to have.  But Miss VanDusen was really patient about spending all the time with me I needed, to learn it.  And then in a genius twist, if I got all the multiplications right on the quiz on one Friday, she'd get me a can of pop out of the machine in the teacher's lounge!  Holy cow, did I ever work hard on that quiz!  Best can of Coke I've ever drank, to this day!  And Miss VanDusen was also our Driver's Ed teacher, when we got to high school.  Driver's Ed was in the summer.  I wish that the Driver's Ed car had been stick, because if anybody could have taught me to drive stick without it ending in tears and swearing, it'd be Miss VanDusen.  I always admired her ability to control a roomful of kids or unruly teenagers (is there any other kind?) and then diffuse anything too intense with humor.  You need to experience the power of a well-placed "hooty!" to believe it!  Magic!

Speaking of Mrs. Blanchard and the library, she always had her library decorated with the best artwork.  Computers were starting to be more and more prevalent, and it was Mrs. Blanchard who taught us to navigate the keyboard.  We had to color our keyboards, one color for the keys controlled by our right hand, another color for those keys controlled by our left.  These were copied keyboards.  Not actual keyboards.  I don't think any of us really got how to type back then, on our Xeroxed keyboards, because who was going to need to know how to type anyway, and besides, we all just wanted to be able to play Word Munchers and Number Munchers on the library's computers.  To this day, though, I still touch something to ground myself before I touch my computer, lest an errant spark destroy the whole thing.  And something I thought was really cool of Mrs. Blanchard was that in fifth grade, when the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched, the first one since the Challenger explosion in 1986, Mrs. Blanchard let my friend Sara and I watch the launch on a TV in the library, because Sara and I wanted to be astronauts and fly in a space shuttle together.  That was pretty awesome. 

In fifth grade, it was kind of a dark time for my class.  We were branded "the worst ever to go through Northern Potter!!!" and that reputation kind of stuck with us for the rest of our lives there.  I think it was uttered out of frustration by someone.  We were frustrating, yes.  I'll readily concede that.  I also think the universe hated us a little bit.  On our fifth grade field trip, one of the buses carrying all sixty of us, plus our teacher-chaperones, broke down on the way, so all of us had to pile onto one bus, three to a seat.  And it was hot that day.  And there was a incident on the way home that my friend Sara would like to forget, I think.  But we also had a lot of fun in the fifth grade, when we weren't being frustrating little terrors making more than one teacher start a countdown clock for their own retirement.  In Mrs. Smith's section that year, our door won the first prize in the whole school for the best one.  It was a Frosty the Snowman that we made by sticking little pieces of tissue paper on a big piece of paper, kind of a pointillism.  It WAS a beautiful door!  And we all worked together to make it happen.  As a section, we were so proud!  Mrs. Peffer, the other fifth grade teacher, I knew better from outside school.  We went to the same church.  My sister and I were in her daughter's wedding.  Outside of school, I thought the world of Mrs. Peffer.  In school, she and I clashed.  But it taught me that you don't have to like everybody in every situation to still be their friend.  I still adore Mrs. Peffer.  I had a baby shower with a very small guest list, and she was on it.  Plus, another thing I learned from Mrs. Peffer is that I listen a lot better with something in my hands, whether it's a pen or knitting needles and yarn.  I think unleashing the two of us on a yarn shop would be good business sense for the yarn shop!

Mrs. Simonetti was the special education teacher when I was in elementary school, and then she came over to the high school.  So I'll be talking about Mrs. Simonetti tomorrow, too, but today, I remember being in her math class- we switched classes and different teachers taught different levels at different times- thinking about it now, the schedule-board at school must have looked like the arrival/departure board at JFK- but recalling my distaste for math, you'll understand why this made such a big impression on me.  One day in class, Mrs. Simonetti was teaching a lesson on estimation, and she brought in chocolate chip cookies for us.  How cool!  But before we could eat 'em, we had to guess how many chocolate chips were in our cookies. I can't remember if I were right or way off, but I do remember the deliciousness of that cookie!  And on another day, it was the eve of a big Lottery drawing, and Mrs. Simonetti said if she won, she'd buy us all calculators.  I went home and prayed hard that Mrs. Simonetti would win the lottery!  But I guess it's a good thing we had to learn how to do our math without.  And Mrs. Simonetti was a stickler for counting back change.  This was something we practiced in math class, counting back change.  She said she'd make the checkers at the store count her change back, and I remember thinking at the time "wow!  I'm glad I'm not HER checker-outer!"  But now, twenty-some years later, I find myself doing the same thing, demanding that the checker-outer count my change back to me the right way.  I'm dismayed that I've gotten a couple vacant stares at this request.  They don't know how to do it, some of them!  Wow!  I'm glad Mrs. Simonetti drilled that skill into our heads!  I really am!  Can you imagine?

Sixth grade.  Mr. Hess and Mr. Miller.  Mr. Miller will also be making a re-appearance as the high school band director.  But right now, he's sixth grade teacher, my favorite of his roles at our school.  But first, Mr. Hess.  He taught us handwriting and social studies.  He was also my math teacher, sometimes, and he let us check our own work in his teacher's book, but then he'd "ok" it.  Mixed numerals in there, we learned.  He also taught Hunter's Safety, which I took.  I got a hundred on the test!  I learned never to accept a gun from someone until they proved it was unloaded.  I've spent one day hunting in the woods since Hunter's Safety in sixth grade, but I think it's a good skill to have simmering in the back of my memory, at least how to use a gun, in case any dangerous animals try to get in my garbage.  Or the Jehovah's Witnesses start coming 'round again...

I'm kidding about the J-dubs!

Mr. Miller was one of those cool sixth grade teachers that really inspired kids.  His walls were cluttered with all kind of things, a rattlesnake encased in some kind of plastic or lucite, clippings from tabloids, factoids, on the window hung a real, honest-to-goodness chest x-ray.  One day, he brought in his muzzleloader, and we all went out to The Circle on the playground, so he could demonstrate how it fired- these were different times- another day, around this time of year, he brought in a deer-lung from a deer he shot during hunting season.  He showed us how it inflated and deflated, with a straw, and then he dissected it for us, while all of us stood in rapt attention, utterly grossed out, but also utterly fascinated.  Wow!  Mr. Miller knew about a lot of things, and as a sixth grade teacher, he was excellent at sparking students' curiosity.  He was our Level A teacher, and Level A was made up of me, and my friends Amy, Sara, and Josh.  With such a small Level A class, we got to do a lot of things we wouldn't normally get to do.  We got to produce videos and go on special field trips.  We had and ant farm and a bonsai tree, both of which met untimely ends, and Amy, Sara, and I always blamed Josh for killing the ant farm and the bonsai tree, but I think I'm at least 75% to blame for the bonsai tree's demise, judging from my success with plants in the years since.  Sixth grade was fun.  A lot of fun.  And that was Mr. Miller.

Our art teacher, Ms. Rutkowski was also our high school art teacher, but I knew her best in elementary school.  She taught me not to be afraid to try new things.  I think it's her influence, at least in part, that I'm kind of a voracious crafter.  Whether it's clay, or painting, or drawing, or tie-dying something, I'm all for trying it at least once. I loved art class!

We had two gym teachers while I was at the School on the Hill.  Mrs. Raber taught us gymnastics and had an after-school dance club.  I knew I wanted to be in the Dance Club from the first time I saw the "big kids" do a dance for the whole school, when I was in first grade.  I loved their costumes.  I loved their shoes.  I loved their square-dancing.  When I was in Dance Club, we did a lot of jump-rope drills, and she changed the theme to space-theme- it was meant to be!  She also had a Baton Club that met Fridays at lunchtime.  Of course I belonged!  And I brought my gold glitter-baton every Friday and would dash off to the gym after eating my lunch and 25-cent ice cream bar, to do some twirlin'!

Mr. Galley was more sports-oriented, less with the gymnastics and dancing.  But he still broke out the Big Parachute.  We'd play "Deer Tag" with Mr. Galley, which was a combo of tag and dodge ball.  One team had to be the hunters, with the playground balls, and the other team had to be the deer.  You had to run around with your hands up like antlers.  It might sound like torture, especially if you weren't a fan of tag or dodgeball, but put yourself in the mindset of a fifth-grader, and then get simple, and you'll see the hilarity in this game.  Mr. Galley was also an excellent Cross-Country coach for the high schoolers.  I was not a runner, so I didn't get to know him as Cross-Country coach, but I did know him as my gym teacher in 5th and 6th grade, and I know the upbeat and enthusiastic way he approached that, so I know that's how he ran his Cross-Country team.  Plus, during those years, our Cross-Country runners were to be feared if you were on another team!

Finally, in the music room, there was Ms. Sitler.  I spoke at-length about her in yesterday's post, and I still don't think I got it all.  But here, I'll say that I never knew her at a time when she wasn't approaching whatever was going on with grace and a sense of humor.  I remember she went on our Sixth Grade Camping Trip.  It was a rainy, drizzly, kind of miserable time.  But every night after dinner, there were campfire songs with Ms. Sitler.  No autoharp.  Just our voices.  Clapping hands, stomping feet.  During the day, she must have taught us a survival skill along with another teacher- there was archery, rifle-shooting, orienteering, canoe-paddling, foraging for edibles and staying away from the poisonous plants, and lanyard-making.  I know she was in on another thing besides just the campfire songs, but that's the lesson I take from her from the 6th grade camping trip: Even if it's wet and raining and you're cold and you sat in a puddle and now your undies are all wet and gross, and you want to go home and sleep in your own bed, sing.  Just keep singing.  Sing in the rain.  Sing on the bus.  Don't stop singing.

I was really lucky to grow up in the school I grew up in.  My teachers- all of them- are part of a big extended family.  All of them are a reason I turned out to be who I am.  I learned something from each and every one of them.  I hope they all know how much I appreciate them for that.

Tomorrow, we're gonna go to high school!

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