High School. See me on the street and ask me if I'd ever go back, and I'd say "hell no!" and keep on walking. That's the knee-jerk version, anyway. The thing of it was, while I was there, in Grades 7-12, which was how our high school was set up, I had my good days and bad days, just like everybody else. The thing we fail to realize when we're teenagers is that all of us are fighting our own battles. The kids who seem to get everything they want, have everything they want, get the best grades, get all the great boys/girls, they're all fighting battles and struggles, too. You see each other every day. Most of the time, people like to keep it a "representative" of themselves that they see at school, but sometimes, the tempers flare, and things can get Turbulent.
I guess upon further examination, if you asked me if I'd ever go back to high school, I still wouldn't want to. Not really. But I'd like to sneak back and have a little talk with myself about lightening the hell up, not being so uptight, not being such an ass, giving everybody else space to go through the same growing I was going through. I'd tell me that ALL of us were wrestling with something, even just insecurity and hormones, but most of us had bigger fish than those to fry, and that stuff just compounded the other things going on. I'd tell myself that things get better, that I, along with everyone I knew, we'd all grow into ourselves someday, and for the most part, we'd all become really good people.
Seriously. I DO have quite a vivid memory, and sometimes, when the house is quiet, and I don't have anything better to do, a memory slips in where I was a complete horse's ass, where I didn't handle something right, where I could have been a lot more mature or nicer or less uptight. I'm not sure I'd like the junior high-high school version of me. I really am not.
Before I start on what my high school teachers mean to me, I want to say to everybody that knew me back then, I'm really sorry for being insufferable. I know I was. I had some real immaturity to grow out of, a sense of entitlement to have corrected, a dose of humility to take. Make that a bottle of humility. I think there were times I left wakes of ill feeling, and I'm really, really sorry about that. I'm trying to be a better person now. I'm trying to be more judicious. And when I remember what a puddle of puke I was in high school, I really and truly thank from the bottom of my heart anybody who knew me then who still talks to me. And for anyone who knew me back then and dodges out of the way to avoid me seeing you first, I get it. I totally get it, and again, I'm sorry for being insufferable back then.
So I think that given the climate in which high school teachers teach, they really deserve a lot more respect than what they get. They get us at that age when we start sharpening our teeth on the bones of the adults in our lives. Our parents bear the brunt of it, and then our teachers have to deal with our rebellion, our poor attitudes, how we're ill-equipped to deal with stuff that fifteen years down the road, we remember and think "why'd I get so wrought-up over THAT?!" And people are people. In high school, really, personalities start coming out more, we get more outspoken, and there are true clashes, personality-wise between students and teachers. I had my teachers I got along with better than others. But I learned from every single one, and there's not a one of them I'd avoid to this day, talking to as People and not so much as a Teacher. So here we go.
My seventh grade homeroom teacher was Mr. Ripley. In high school, they did homerooms by last name, so it was never a surprise who would be in your homeroom, but your teacher could be kind of a surprise. Mr. Ripley was the junior high "resource room" teacher, so I wouldn't have had an opportunity to know him, except for homeroom. Mr. Ripley was really good about greeting each of us by name, saying hello to us in the hall. He was good at small-talk, which is something I've always struggled with (and yet, I was always getting called out in elementary school for being overly chatty. Hmmm.) He was really good about making each one of us feel important for a minute or two. When I think of Mr. Ripley, the first words that come to mind are "good sport, good guy."
Mrs. Bloom was my Pre Algebra and Algebra I teacher. She was a fun person. I liked her as a person. I hated Pre Algebra and Algebra I. It was the stuff of my nightmares, and we played a lot of kickball in Pre Algebra and Algebra I those two years. Kickball was also the stuff of my nightmares. It was one of those situations where a brilliant teacher was having a couple of awful years. I appreciate that now, and I understand. One thing that's stuck with me that Mrs. Bloom taught me is a set of tricks for being able to tell at a glance what numbers will divide into another number. Everybody knows that if the last number's even, you can divide it by 2. And if it ends in 5 or 0, it's evenly divisible by 5. But there's one for knowing if a number is divisible by 3. You add up the digits, then divide the sum by 3. If you get a whole number from dividing the sum of the digits, then the original number divides evenly by three. Also, Mrs. Bloom was always saying she wished she could drop a Midol in the water and have all of us junior high girls drink out of the fountain. It was funny when she said it, even back then, when we WERE in need of Midol. Even in the midst of everything she was going through at the time, Mrs. Bloom still had a good sense of humor and a quick, contagious laugh. And her tricks for knowing if a certain number is divisible by another saved me a lot of time on calculations when I took my pilot's written test, believe it or not.
Mr. Baker was our ninth grade science teacher, but only for part of the year, because there was something with certification, and the Grades 7-9 science classes got all jumbled up that year, and we ended up with Mr. Baker for only half a year, and then Mr. Bennett for the other half. But I remember the giant Periodic Table of the Elements painted on Mr. Baker's back wall. He was a stickler for calling "soil" "soil" and not "dirt," because "dirt is an invention by Madison Avenue to get you to buy soap!" And also, "not all chemicals are toxic; water IS a chemical, and you drink it every day! You need it in order to live!" Mr. Baker was also a volunteer firefighter- he might still be. I think it takes a really great person to do that, volunteer firefighting. And he had really good stories from that. Those stinky farm-pits (where farmers store the cow-poop until they spray it on the fields) were just a nuisance to me before I was in Mr. Baker's class. But he told about how you could literally DIE from falling into one, and not just die of embarrassment because you fell into a pit of poop, but the methane gas could suffocate you. I'm not really sure why it's THAT story that's so prevalent in my memory from Mr. Baker, but it is. And then junior year, he was the lunch monitor for my lunchtime. I had an early version of a Brita water filter, and he told me that those water filters were great for getting chlorine taste out of water, but they didn't do anything for microbes, so if I ever took my water filter out hiking, not to trust it to filter out any microbes that would be in any water I'd think to fill my water bottle up with. That's stuck with me, too. I'm an indoor girl and I don't "hike," but I've had a filtering water bottle along other places with water fountains, and if the water fountain looked skeevy, I'd remember Mr. Baker telling me "those filters won't do anything with the microbes that could be in that water!" and just shuffle right past those skeevy water fountains.
Mr. Wood was the guidance counselor. He was always there to chaperone a trip, to head up a boy scout troop, he and his wife volunteered their dogs as pick-me-up animals at the local hospital, they themselves were volunteer firefighters, and members of the Potter County Clown Organization. How fun is that? To me, Mr. Wood was more than a guidance counselor. He lived service. I mean Service, with a capital S.
In Mrs. Fessenden's Home Ec classes in seventh and eighth grade, I learned that if you're having people over to your house for dinner, don't serve broccoli or other pungent vegetables that can make an unpleasant impression when they come through the door, and also, make sure if you're serving milk, that it's cold-cold-COLD! I still use my recipe for Saucepan Brownies every so often, and I will always remember that the carambola is known as the "star-fruit," because of its distinctive shape. The other night at Wegmans, I wheeled Zoe past the carambola in the produce section and told her the yellow fruits were called "star-fruit." She clapped her hands and reached out. I thought she wanted a star-fruit. As it turned out, Shane was standing right there, and Zoe wanted out of the cart. But still, I kind of wish I'd paid more attention in Home Ec. It's kind of an important class, once you're out on your own, but it seems like that class is always one that gets pre-empted for achievement testing or other interruptions.
On the flip-side of Home Ec was shop. Back when I was in school, Shop Class was still Shop Class! We even got to use the real and dangerous tools. Back then, Mr. Gamble was the shop teacher, and if you thought you were going to blow off shop class and not respect it, like maybe you'd blow off Home Ec and flirt with the boys at your table instead of paying attention, you had another thing coming in Mr. Gamble's shop. Like I said. We used real and dangerous tools. A classmate of mine left part of his finger or thumb on the bandsaw. Someone else had an unfortunate incident with the forge and suffered a burn to the hand. And Mr. Gamble didn't let you off the hook for doing shoddy work in his class, just because you were a girl. If you tried to turn in a project that had "half-assed" written all over it, he'd make you either try to selvage it, or start it all over again, from blank wood. The thing I learned from Mr. Gamble was that even if you didn't want to be in a class, even if you didn't think you'd ever use in your life the knowledge of the workings of a drill press or sand-block, you have enough respect for your work to give it your best. You don't make excuses for yourself. You don't just phone it in, brush your hands off and call it a day. You do your damn best. Mr. Gamble's the guidance counselor now, and I know that especially with the college-bound students, he pushes them to Think and Do Big.
Mrs. Shirk. Mrs. Shirk! The larger world might remember Mrs. Shirk for her brief appearance on Survivor:Palau, where she was packaged as "Wacky Wanda," which I've always thought was horribly unfair to her. Mrs. Shirk was my seventh and eighth grade English teacher (and is the mom of one of my BEST friends!) That whole thing about "Wacky Wanda" and her indiscriminate and incessant singing is just a thread in her fabric that got plucked and blown out of proportion. The REAL Mrs. Shirk taught with ENTHUSIASM!!! every so often, she'd pull out the ukulele and treat us to a chorus of "Eatin' Hog Bellies with Stuffin' Inside!" but most of the time, she did her best to make things like grammar and spelling matter to us. Besides the hog belly song, I bet there's not one of us who was in her class that can't recite what an adverb tells: "Who What Where When Why TO what degree, To what extent, and UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS?!" A, an, and the are articles!!! Besides that, Mrs. Shirk always cared very deeply for her students. She would go to great lengths, even sacrificing her own personal dignity to get a point across and make it memorable. She instilled a sense of personal responsibility in her students, urging us to think for ourselves, to be ourselves, to stay true to ourselves. There's nothing wacky about that!
In seventh and eighth grade literature class, my teacher was Mrs. Wilcox. I didn't think Mrs. Wilcox and I were going to hit it off, the third day of school in seventh grade. I really didn't. She had a system of "detention points" that you'd get for infractions ranging from minor to major, although for the Major Infractions, I think she just wrote you up for detention. Anyway, three detention points got you a night of detention, and on the third day of school in seventh grade, I grabbed the wrong comp book out of my locker- so many comp books! Only three minutes between each class! Reading was eighth period! Wha-a-a-a-at?! So, I realized too late that I'd grabbed the wrong comp book- I grabbed my math comp book instead of my Reading Journal (*stupid, stupid!*). When I told Mrs. Wilcox, she scowled that scowl only a teacher can wield, and sent me to my locker to get my Reading Journal, but informed me that I had One Detention Point. I was snuffly as I went and got my journal, and when I got home that night, I made sure I never made that mistake again. My college friends always laughed at my propensity for color-coding, but there was a reason behind it- I clear-taped a different color construction paper to the spine of each of my otherwise identical manilla-colored "Modern" composition books so I would never again earn another detention point for bringing the wrong book to class!
As gruff as she came off as being that first week of seventh grade, Mrs. Wilcox soon showed she had a wicked sense of humor. I remember one time in our 8th-period 7th-grade reading classes, one of us girls got snippy with her- I don't remember which one of us, but I DO know it wasn't me- she'd put the Fear in me that third day of class and I minded my Ps and Qs in her room from then on- but somebody pulled an attitude with Mrs. Wilcox, and she rolled her eyes and intoned under her breath "well, excuse me all to hell, anyway!" and when my friend Danielle said "What was that, Mrs. Wilcox?!" Mrs. Wilcox cleared her throat and grinned and said "I burped." Brilliant! Another time, my friend Jeremiah had apparently had enough of his day, and enough of our five minutes of compulsory journaling. And it was a day that Mrs. Wilcox was doing one of her random journal checks. She stopped at Jeremiah's desk, picked up his journal, and read, "Dear Journal, today was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, VERY, very, very, very, very, very (....) long day. The end." Our whole class sort of took a collective breath, waiting for Jeremiah to get a Detention Point, but Mrs. Wilcox tipped her head back and laughed. One day, she gave our entire class Wienermobile whistles and instructed us to play them. Oh, you haven't heard Wienermobile whistles until you've heard a classroom of them whistling along in chorus! I don't think it was for any other reason than that it was wintertime, and we'd all settled into the doldrums, and Mrs. Wilcox and the whistles shook us out of them!
It was in eighth grade that I had another disagreement with Mrs. Wilcox. Nothing that caused a rift or anything. But I did resent having to read Johnny Tremain. It wasn't my thing, it was boring, I just didn't want to read it, and I wasn't going to! Mrs. Wilcox told me I WAS, in fact, going to read the book, and she'd dare to bet that I'd end up liking it. Well, I read it, but hated the ending, and I told her so. "So write a new ending," she said. And I did. And I've been writing and re-writing my version for the last two decades, for no other reason than it's my safe place, they're my old friends, writing-wise. Before that, writing never occurred to me as something that I wanted to DO, let alone that I was any good at. In eighth grade, she sent me to the Mansfield Ready Writing Contest, and I went (with mixed success) every year following, through senior year. It was from Mrs. Wilcox that I learned that writing was something that I could do, that I was good at, and that was kind of an escape from being an obnoxious teenager, a way into another world.
We lost Mrs. Wilcox too soon, in the summer between tenth and eleventh grade (for me). She was fifty-six or fifty-eight, I think. At the time, it seemed a lot older than it does now, but still too young. I think there might be more from Mrs. Wilcox, maybe another day. But the kernel here is that I thought we weren't going to like each other, and she turned out to be one of the most influential teachers in my life.
In ninth grade, it was Mr. Parsell's last year of teaching. He was a hold-over from when my parents were in high school. In the Sixties! Woah! The first day of ninth grade (he taught history for ninth graders and Problems Of Democracy for seniors), he asked me if I were Gerry's daughter or Wayne's daughter, and I asked if my answer would affect my grade, and he said he didn't have to ask further. I was obviously Gerry's daughter. Mr. Parsell used a lot of colorful expressions. "Shooting fish with a hammer." "Lights out, the party's over." "Goodnight, Irene!" Looking back, he was kind of the Rick Jeanneret of Northern Potter, both for long tenure, and for the colorful turn of phrase.
Mrs. Walizer was a legend. She was the librarian of the school from when it was built until a few years after I graduated. That's over four decades. When you went into the library to buy index cards, you'd tell her how many you wanted, and she'd pick up her deck of index cards, and I can't really describe the motion, but they'd kind of whi-i-i-i-ii-r onto the library table, and there would be the EXACT number of index cards. I tried it once, when I was on her morning announcement crew, junior and senior year. Index cards went everywhere. She made me pick up every last one (rightfully so!) and make sure they were all lined-side up, with the top line at the top. I still don't know how she did it. She never missed! The index cards never just clumped and spread all over like when I tried it. Another thing Mrs. Walizer said, when we had seventh grade library class, was that she pulled the books out on the shelves so their spines were even with the edge of the shelf; that way, no dust would build up on the edge of the shelf (that you could see, anyway), and you wouldn't have to dust the shelf. And that was good, because she said she "hated dusting!" She was another of those teachers who could appear gruff, but then show a really wicked sense of humor, too. I adored her, and not to take away from Mrs. Walizer's successor, or the current high school librarian (a friend of mine!), but to me, Mrs. Walizer will always be the once and future librarian of my high school.
Mr. Duperron was the Ag teacher, and I never took Ag, but I had a couple individual study halls with him when my regular study hall teacher had something else to do. The Ag kids loved him. I thought he was a funny little round man with mutton chops, and I was scared to death of him because I couldn't understand a damn word he said. I didn't want to get thrown in the pokey for insubordination for not doing something Mr. Duperron told me to do, because I honestly didn't understand the words that were coming out of his mouth. He was from some foreign country like Rhode Island, or somewhere. Everything was "Dumas," (pronounced DOO-mas). He'd send you down to the office for some Dumas Paper (what the hell?!- the secretaries would just smile in that way they would that all but said "bless your heart," and you KNOW what that means, and hand you a ream of regular paper). If you weren't doing what Mr. Duperron thought you were supposed to be doing, he'd call YOU the Dumas. Wha-a-a-a-aa-T?! When I was at college, I was telling my advisor about Mr. Duperron, and how everything and everyone was "Dumas," and stopped right in the middle of my story with a realization. "Oh, my God! Duperron called me a dumbass! THAT'S what 'Dumas' was!" And I just burst into laughter. My advisor got a chuckle out of that, too, because I think sometimes, he would have liked to have a word like Dumas to throw at me.
Mrs. Kibbe was around to teach French (and German for the kids who opted for that language) for my ninth grade year. I liked French class, and really liked Mrs. Kibbe's twisted sense of humor. She had this thing about Peeps. She suggested if any of our relatives had a Velvet Elvis painting, we ought to bite off half a Peep and stick the other half to the painting (to promote family harmony and good taste, I think). She told us that the best way to eat a Marshmallow Peep was to open the package, and put it up on top of the refrigerator for a few weeks, so they'd get a little stale, and then they had a good crunch. I tried it (of course!), and aged Peeps DO have a pleasant flavor and quality all their own, a little like the inside of a vanilla Oh Henry bar that you put in the freezer. At Easter time, my friend Amy brought in enough yellow Peeps for the whole class, and Mrs. Kibbe pulled out a bunch of miniature French flags with wire stems, and we each impaled our Peep with the French flag and sat it on the windowsill. The plan was that on the last day of school, we'd burn all our French papers and have a Peep roast.
I think that someone must have gotten to Mrs. Kibbe and told her we were "that class," because one Monday, we came in, the Peeps were gone, and there was no more talk of us and open fire for the rest of the year. She also pointed out one day that Ramie Solis and I were anti-establishment. Ray was, because his Sabres T-shirt was sewn so it looked like he was wearing it backwards and inside-out, with the logo upside-down. I was anti-establishment because I wore white shoes before Memorial Day. I allowed as to how I thought it was Easter, and she correctly corrected me. Noted, Mrs. Kibbe! At least now when I break that rule, I KNOW I'm breaking it, and for that, I thank you!
Miss Hopple, who taught us how to type (on typewriters!) in ninth grade, was the business teacher, and also the soccer cheerleading advisor. I was a soccer cheerleader! I was a disaster at typing on the typewriters, and I was also a disaster at cheerleading, but I made kickass cheerleader-posters. I'm proud of me for my posters. But I remember Miss Hopple told us at a soccer game one day, that we could keep our canvas cheerleading sneakers white by spraying them with Tilex when they got all crudded up. And I used Tilex on many a pair of white Keds until I decided I needed a shoe that added about four inches of height to my meager height allotment. But the Tilex thing works on other white shoes, as well. And another tip from Miss Hopple was that when you got a new pair of dress shoes, put your biggest, thickest socks on and wear the dress shoes around the house for a day, to get them stretched out so they won't press and rub so many blisters.
Mr. Doud was a math teacher, but he taught the maths I didn't get to take. Instead, he was my homeroom teacher in Grade 9 and also again senior year. But senior year, I was on the announcement crew, so I was never actually in homeroom. My locker was RIGHT beside Mr. Doud's door, though, so I had to mind my Ps and Qs. Mr. Doud has always reminded me of Tom Hanks. If they made a movie about Northern Potter, Tom Hanks would play Mr. Doud. Also, for two different years, as my homeroom teacher, it was Mr. Doud who'd hand me my report card every six weeks, except for the one at the end of the year that got mailed directly home. In ninth grade and in twelfth (all the grades, let's be honest), there was always a grade on my report card that was startlingly low, by my standards, and I'd hyperventilate. I was *that* kid. And Mr. Doud would talk me down and tell me my parents WEREN'T going to kill me for the bad grades. Always did it with a straight face, too, and looking back, what he probably really should have done is smack me upside the head and say, "these are good grades, Wynick! Get a grip!" But he never did. He'd let me have my moment of self-pity, then tell me I'd be all right and send me on my way. Teenage girls need to be dramatic, and it was good of him to let me be.
Oh, Mr. Lynch. He and I didn't get along. It was ninth grade Algebra II, eighth period, a time when all us obnoxious teenagers should have been taking a nap or in gym class, not in a class like Algebra II. It was hard for me to think heavy-duty after 1:30, and this class was scheduled right before bustime. Mr. Lynch expressed his distaste for this at the beginning of the year, and then we pressed on. In retrospect, he did the best he could with what he was given. And I think a lot of our clash came from me Just Not Getting Algebra, and him giving me more credit than I deserved and thinking that "not getting it," and asking him to explain it again, different, was me being a smartass. I know I could come off like a smartass at 14 when I didn't want people finding out how much of a dumbass I really was. But one day, when we were working on Matrices, NOBODY in the class was getting the message. And instead of all of us, especially Mr. Lynch, just banging our heads against the wall or floor or whichever hard surface was most punishing, Mr. Lynch did something pretty amazing. He asked for help explaining it to us. He left our classroom, went down the hall, fetched Mr. Kosa, and Mr. Kosa explained the magical, mysterious matrix to us, and we all did pretty darned well on that test. So even though Mr. Lynch and I had our differences and to this day he probably thinks I was a smartassy dolt, I have to admire him for realizing that we'd all reached a dead-end together on the matrix, and that he needed someone else to help us get past that roadblock. It wasn't poor teaching. I think that was a BIG lesson he taught us that day. When you've gone as far as you can and don't know what else to do, the strongest thing you CAN do is send up a flare and let someone help you out. That's a big, BIG important lesson, Mr. Lynch. Thank. You!
Mr. Curry and my class have an interesting history. He was our science teacher for seventh and eighth grade, and then was furloughed while we were in ninth, and came back to teach senior high science. Mr. Curry and my class butted heads a lot, and Mr. Curry and I butted heads a lot (he told me once I was lazy, and I resented it... because he was right). But the thing about Mr. Curry was that he had integrity. He tried to make us "get it." He gave us projects like building an atom, and he gave us "magic square" quizzes. He advised us to think for ourselves instead of going along with mob mentality, something my friend Kim famously lampooned all the time, Mr. Curry's "You're born alone, you'll die alone" speech. But he was right. In the end, the only thing we have to go on is our own moral compass, because the thing about mobs is that over time, they tend to disperse and you're left standing on your own. Mr. Curry is another of those teachers that I didn't always like as a teacher, but I always adored as a PERSON. And to this day, when I have to study something, I use the SQ3R method: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review! Hated it when I just wanted to plow through bio or chem homework, but it, and keeping obsessive notebooks, has never done me wrong. For my college friends, it was Mr. Curry who got me on to making flash-cards!
Miss Barker was the girls' gym teacher for my first few years of high school. She always let us do archery at the beginning of the schoolyear, as archery was one of her passions in life. Even though gym class wasn't one of my favorites, Miss Barker was. She had a sweatshirt she'd wear sometimes that said "Progress, not perfection," and I've always reminded myself of that when I slip up on something I've been trying really, really hard to get right. She was our health teacher in ninth grade, too. My friend Berb, on a vocab quiz in Health class one day, facetiously defined "starvation" as "living in Somalia," and Miss Barker marked it wrong but conceded that she admired Berb's sense of humor. Miss Barker was always really upbeat in our gym classes. And I still think it's pretty cool that she taught girls' gym how to shoot a bow.
Miss Brenner/Mrs. Bieser took over for Miss Barker as girls' gym teacher when Miss Barker left to pursue other things. Miss Brenner's (that's how I knew her in school) approach to gym was different from Miss Barker's. The first thing Miss Brenner did was teach us how to use the weights in the weightroom! WOW! She taught me how I could use weights to strengthen my quads and hamstrings, so my knees wouldn't be such weak spots. For a little while, our gym classes were thirty-five minute-long aerobics sessions! (Miss Brenner was an aerobics instructor, too!) I couldn't walk at the end, but I LOVED it! She once said that sometimes, when you're feeling crappy, instead of laying on the couch, get up and move, and you'll feel so much better. It's so true! And on the days when I kind of don't want to go workout at the gym, I hear Miss Brenner say that, and I think 'you know, she's right. Time to get movin'!" And I feel so much better when I'm finished!
Because junior year, there were only 6 girls in my gym section, our class combined with the boys' gym class for most things, and senior year, we also did a lot of joint classes with the boys. Mr. Burdick was the boys' gym teacher. I didn't know him very well before junior year, and he was another one that kind of scared the crap out of me. He took a lot of guff for it from the parents of the softer kids, but he graded gym class like he meant it, damn it! (in those days, the thing that scared me most in the world was a poor grade) I knew him mostly from watching him coach the JV boys basketball team on pep band night. He'd get ANGRY! And now he was pretty much my gym teacher! I was done! Except I wasn't. I found out Mr. Burdick was actually a lot of fun. He wasn't so much about having you be excellent at gym class, but he was all about having you be excellent at TRYING. Mr. Burdick is the one that introduced me to hockey. We'd play with the boys. I think that's what you need to do. Throw a bunch of drama queen teenage girls in with the boys for hockey in gym class. If this happened regularly, say, once or twice a week, there would be NO drama! None! I went into gym junior year as one of the soft kids. I got hit in the face with a floor-hockey puck, mauled by a hockey stick, creamed into a wall during a particularly rough game of basketball, and rode down a ski-slope on my face on our gym class field trip to Ski Denton (after that last one, I asked Mr. Burdick to point me in the direction of the bunny slope. "Wynick," he said. "You just came DOWN the bunny slope! On your face!") Much as I wanted to, during all those things, I didn't cry. You don't cry when you take gym with the boys. You don't cry, for God's sake. No crying. You get back up. You take a breath. You walk it off. You get back in there. I wasn't such a soft kid after eleventh grade gym. Above everything else he ever taught me in gym or 11th grade health class, that lesson, 'get up and don't cry and get back in there!' has served me the best. And also that you don't have to be excellent at everything, but you DO have to be excellent at TRYING. There's no excuse for half-assery.
In high school, I was a "music major," meaning I was in band and chorus and all the special groups I could be in. Not Show Choir, though. I was not nearly coordinated enough to dance, let alone dance and sing at the same time. Mrs. Galley, the chorus director, taught me how to breathe. She taught us ALL how to breathe. Sit up straight, and don't breathe from your shoulders. Breathe from your diaphragm. If you have to, lie on your back on the floor with your knees bent- we did this one day in chorus. When you breathe, pay attention that your stomach rises and falls with each breath. Get a feel for that. Now do that while you're standing up. And don't slouch, because it keeps you from breathing right, and also adds ten pounds to your middle. I'll never forget that from Mrs. Galley.
Mr. Miller, the same who was the excellent sixth grade teacher, came over to the high school when my class did, and was the band director. Mr. Miller made concerts fun. He knew how to unwind a room full of nervy, wrapped-too-tight high school band kids. He always wore a tuxedo to our concerts, an over-the-top velvet jobbie, with a bowtie and a ruffled shirt. That alone was enough to make you grin (but somehow was EXACTLY what Mr. Miller ought to wear to a band concert!) I still think, for my money, he shined brightest as a sixth grade teacher. But he did make band fun, and I think I'd have the worst case of stagefright in the world if it weren't for Mr. Miller.
Miss Valentine started out as my ninth grade English teacher. She taught me creative writing and expository writing in tenth grade, and in eleventh grade, she became the school principal. Before she was principal, she was the Student Council Advisor, and I was a fixture on Student Council all six years at Northern Potter. There's so much that Miss Valentine taught me over the years, oceans of encouragement. She was my first true mentor. I mean Mentor with a capital M. Not just with writing, but with just how to be. I see Miss Valentine periodically- mostly when we do our annual school dental exams, and the school nurse PRAYS we get the exams out of the way before we find Miss Valentine, because once we see her, there's no getting a word in edgewise. Miss Valentine and I pick up our conversation from the last time we saw each other, and it's like it hasn't been so long since last time. As a teacher, she was dedicated and enthusiastic, and driven by a deep desire to give her students the best, to make them be their best. As principal, she's no less dedicated and enthusiastic and driven. And this isn't coming from blind adoration because I never found myself on the wrong end of one of Miss Valentine's dark looks. Like I've said before, when I was in high school, overall I was one of the "good kids," whatever that means, but I had my moments of being a bitch on wheels. And I'll tell you what, nothing let the air out of my tires like just a look from Miss Valentine. If you've been on *that* end of that look, you know which one I mean. Instant bowing of head. Instant slumping of shoulders. An "I'm sorry, Miss V," in a small voice. Lesson learned. I will be better next time! I didn't get that look very many times in my career, because I hated feeling like I'd let Miss Valentine down.
Mr. Donald Miller taught me French after Mrs. Kibbe left. Mr. D Miller always talked to us like we were real people. His was always one of my favorite classes. Junior and senior year, I WAS the French class for my grade, so I got a lot of leeway, a lot of independent study. I read Madame Bovary in French (my friend Berb was outraged that he made me read Madame Bovary- Berb had Madame Bovary confused with Lady Chatterley's Lover. *red face!*) He was one of my favorites, Mr. D Miller, because he never hesitated to call me out on my moments of bitchery and bullshit. He didn't use those words, though. He would call me out, but before the conversation was over, he made sure I was out of the bell jar and that tomorrow was a new day. When I started watching Family Guy, the Stewie character reminded me of Mr. D Miller. In a good way. I like Stewie. He has a dark and dry sense of humor. That's Mr. D Miller to me. And if you wanted to learn, he made sure you had the opportunity.
Mrs. Garner was my study hall teacher in seventh grade. For about a week. I was chatty and social during what was a Study. Hall. She called me out for it, and I took up an extra instrument so I didn't have study halls. We still laugh about that. Besides study hall, Mrs. Garner taught us Computers in ninth grade, and tenth grade English. She also taught Shakespeare and Journalism, and I don't know why I didn't take those classes. They would have been right up my alley. Mrs. Garner just hated Radio Shack. Hated them! And I don't know what she did to get herself banned from Radio Shack, but she was banned from Radio Shack, so she'd go stand just outside the store and wave at the Radio Shack drones inside. To this day, that image makes me cackle like Woodstock from the Peanuts cartoons. The most practical thing Mrs. Garner taught me, though, in tenth grade English, was the proper use of apostrophes and how to correctly pluralize things. We also had to read a book called Follow the River in her class. She read us the first chapter because she said if she didn't, we'd all throw down our books and never pick them back up because the first chapter was so violent. It was. I didn't like the book the whole time I read it. It still isn't one I'd pick up again, but I think my life's a little richer for having read that book. More importantly, I think that finishing something I started and wasn't wild about makes me a better person than if I'd just stopped reading the assigned book and swallowed the poor quiz grades. Another form of integrity, that, I think.
Mr. Lander was our social studies teacher for seventh and eighth grade and then we were in his class for Problems of Democracy. Boy, there's another class I wish I'd have taken more seriously, because look at everything that's gone on in our democracy since 1996. I mean, WOW! The thing that really stuck with me from Mr. Lander was that he was registered Independent. At the time, most people around here were Republicans. There were a few Democrats. I thought it was crazy that Mr. Lander was an Independent. He said it was because he couldn't agree with either party enough to side all the way with one or the other. That's kind of lost on a bunch of seventeen year-olds who'd rather be doing anything besides talking about government, but it's something I've thought a lot about since. I originally registered with one political party, but after years of giving it a lot of serious thought, when I moved back up home and needed to change my address again, I decided to switch parties. To Independent. Like Mr. Lander, I'd come to be more comfortable in the political gray area, choosing how I think on the issues for myself, instead of having my opinions passed down to me. In his way, Mr. Lander was teaching by example to think for yourself. Even if you don't get to vote in the primaries, and to understand why, as Indies, we do not get to. What I wish is that Mr. Lander could teach an Adult Refresher Seminar on Problems of Democracy. This time around, I wouldn't be skipping out on POD for class officer meetings and the like.
Mrs. Simonetti, the same one from the elementary school, came up to the high school, too. She was our class advisor, junior and senior year, and I was always the class secretary. As a class officer, we got to spend time with Mrs. Simonetti where she was more of a person than just "teacher" to us. I know I say this a lot about teachers, but Mrs. Simonetti had a really fun sense of humor. She made sure we kept our class prom classy. She taught us how to get the wrinkles out of our graduation gowns (a steamer- never an iron!) She braved us on our class trip. She used to "tan," and she had a T-shirt that she'd wear that said "U Can Never B 2 Tan." I'd always follow it up with "Yes I can, Nan!" (her name's Nan!) It would double me over, because there was so much unintentional rhyming, and also because even back then, me being a redhead, tanning and I don't mix. Too, she was pleasantly surprised when our class chose "I'll Stand By You" by The Pretenders as our song for the prom. "The Pretenders?" she said. "From MY day?" Teachers ARE people, too! They have music from "their" days! They get a kick out of it when their students find out they like the same music!
Senior year, Mr. Bennett taught us physics. He also taught us, out of the blue, that if you're a girl, never erase the blackboard side-to-side. Always erase it in vertical strokes, because you don't want to give perverted boys a free-show. Random, but true. He also had this complex where he wouldn't go to any of the basketball games for a while if the one he'd gone to most recently ended in a loss for our team. He didn't want to be a jinx. He'd pretend that a lot of our sophomoric, adolescent humor went right over his head, and then he'd sucker-punch us with a zinger of his own when we'd least expect it. He got a new red Blazer right before school started our senior year, and while the weather was still nice in September, he decided to teach us about momentum and acceleration by taking our class (there were only 6 of us) on an impromptu field trip to Tastee Freez in Coudersport for ice cream. That wouldn't happen these days, but that's why I'm glad I grew up when I did. It was fun to see Mr. Bennett so gleeful. Gleeful. That's the word that I think of when I think of Mr. Bennett. Sly grin, dancing eyes. Also, 'mad scientist,' in the best possible way. If Harry Potter were real and Mr. Bennett were in it, he'd be the one to invent and manufacture the Marauder's Map, I just know it.
When I was in school, she was Mrs. Hopkins. By the time my sister got to senior high English, she was Mrs. Coyle, but a rose by any name is still sweet. Mrs. Hopkins was the quintessential English teacher, I've decided. She was kind, but her kindness was not to be mistaken for weakness. When there were boys who didn't like to read in our class, she'd suggest to them that they try Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair. I've never read it, but she mentioned it so much, I think I ought to. She really tried to make sure that everyone in the class was engaged in the subject. She'd been Mrs. Wilcox's best friend. In eleventh grade, she had us do a project where we went into the woods and became "the transparent eyeball" the Transcendentalists were so fond of. It was around Thanksgiving break time, and I did go sit outside, in the woods, and become the transparent eyeball. That one English assignment really changed my life. The point of it was to observe without interfering, without calling attention to yourself. There are lots of times in real life when you need to observe without interfering, without calling attention to yourself. There are even more times in writing when you need to do. Mrs. Hopkins always encouraged me. As my student council advisor the year I was president, she let me go off on my whims, no matter how ill-advised, and I learned lessons that way. By falling on my duff when I needed to. And when I'd get mired down in self-pity, which was kind of my thing in high school, Mrs. Hopkins was there with a pat on the back, a "there, there," and then a good brisk shove when it was time to move out of it. I think Mrs. Hopkins was one of those universally-beloved teachers. She was definitely an example to me of how to be.
Mr. Kosa. Geometry, Trig, and Calc. The three Wicked Sisters, as far as I was concerned. I didn't have a "math brain," but somehow I managed to stay in the High Maths until the bitter end of high school. I got through it, and that's in no small part due to Mr. Kosa's teaching ability... and patience. I remember one standoff with Mr. Kosa, where I was spazzing out about not being able to get trig, and I whined that I didn't get it because I was stupid. "You're not stupid!!!" he nearly shrieked. "You're just lazy!!!!!" That made the air leave my lungs. There was no smartassy answer for that one, because boy, had he hit the nail on the head on that one! By the eleventh grade, I'd developed this poor habit of just hanging something up if I didn't naturally get it. A piss-poor attitude to have. Definitely the wrong one to have in Mr. Kosa's class.
Mr. Kosa valued and respected hard work and had little time for excuses. He was tough, but it was more a tough-love thing. He's say things like "You're not stupid! You're just lazy!" because he wanted us to be our best, not because he loved being an ogre. Not all medicine can be effectively given with a spoonful of sugar, and even though it would make me knot up inside, and spit blood at times, I really respect Mr. Kosa for knowing when the sugar isn't going to cut it anymore and letting the straight-up medicine fly. Another day in trig, he reached the end of the line with our blank stares, and shouted "Math is not a spectator sport! If you're here to spectate, then you can pay a dollar at the door to just sit here!" Thing is, when I tried paying a dollar the next day, so I could just spectate, he gave the dollar back and growled that "I was kidding, April!!!"
There could be a whole book on Mr. Kosa, and in fact, I think he should write and market a book of his own, even one just full of his sayings. My favorite was "This makes me mad enough to stomp on baby chicks! This just FRIES me!" My friend Berb's favorite is any of the quotes about staying out of the Free Cheese Line. He should do that. In the meantime, for my purposes here, I've got to say that besides all the straight-up medicine, like calling me out for being lazy when I absolutely was lazy, there was a lot of laughing that went on in Mr. Kosa's classes. Things most certainly got Intense. But he did this thing where when he saw ALL of us had had Enough for the day, he'd change the subject, bring us back off our cloud of steam. There were some days when we'd all get laughing so hard in Mr. Kosa's class, our sides would hurt. After I'd graduated, my sister was in his calculus class. She also played basketball. She wasn't a basketball star. She WAS a math star. She got ten varsity points in her whole basketball career, and Mr. Kosa baked her a cake for her ten varsity points. It wasn't to belittle her, but it really was to celebrate those ten points, even if it was in a tongue-in-cheek way. I thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever heard. Colleen had fought for those ten varsity points, and Mr. Kosa, a basketball coach himself, was acknowledging that.
The big lesson I learned from Mr. Kosa, he wrote in my senior yearbook. "You don't have to apologize for everything, just some things." I used to apologize for everything. I've become more judicious about the apologizing. Take your work seriously, but don't take yourself seriously. That, and I know I'm not stupid, and every time I feel like being lazy and phoning something in I shouldn't just phone in, I hear Mr. Kosa yell at me "Don't be lazy!" That is something that someone like me needs to have stitched on a pillow. Or across my forearm.
Mr. Kibbe taught us tenth and eleventh grade history and Senior Selected Topics. In an age before The Tudors, he could get kids by the classful to remember the names and order of Henry VIII's wives, and how each was un-wifed. He taught us how to look for and remember details. He was already famous for his Current Events assemblies, a kind of high school quiz-show style head-to-head to see which class's team knew the most about Current Events. He later expanded into Jeopardy assemblies. When I was in school, Current Events happened twice a year, and Jeopardy once. Each was an EVENT, enormous undertaking. They were epic. And a lot of fun.
Mr. Kibbe's energy is what really always has stuck with me. Mr. Kibbe is another one that could have a whole book to himself, and he's the quintessential "Dad," I believe. But what always amazed me about Mr. Kibbe was that he worked all day at school, would ref volleyball and basketball, depending on the season, and then get up at 4 in the morning to tend to his family farm. "I like to get up that early in the morning," Mr. Kibbe would say when we'd ask him why in the heck he'd get up willingly at 4 am in the morning. "I like to breathe the air before anybody else does!"
When I was in college, I'd get up at 5:30, which is ungodly early for a college kid. And when people would ask me why, part of it was because I didn't like to be hurried around in the bathroom, which turned into Grand Central Station around 7:30, 8:00, and also, I'd say what Mr. Kibbe always would say. "I like to breathe the air before anyone else does!"
These people were my family, all of them. You don't go to a school for six years and expect to just walk out the doors a last time and not have it feel like you've had a limb taken away for a while. That feeling hit me hard, right after I stepped off the stage a last time at graduation. I was leaving and I wasn't coming back. All these people, who'd acted as stand-in parents during the school day, friends, I wasn't going to come back in the fall and get to see them every day. I could always come back and say "hey," but I couldn't expect to disrupt other kids' time with these teachers. And coming back and saying "hey" wasn't at all the same as being there, day-in, day-out.
I think high school teachers are especially great people, given that they have rather hostile working conditions, by nature of their pupils. Half-formed humans running around thinking they have all the answers. Won't be told anything. I feel very lucky to have had so many teachers who could get past that, and teach me before I swam off to a bigger pond.
Tomorrow, I'm taking you to college with me.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
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!
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!
Sunday, December 2, 2012
One of the Brightest Lights
I just learned some news that took my breath away. My music teacher from elementary school, Darlene J. Sitler, was shot and killed at church. Her ex-husband was the gunman. Everything about this is the stuff of nightmares. It happened in church, with so many other families around. The church is in a small town, a place that is almost idyllic at its very best. Things like this just don't happen here. And Darlene. Why Darlene? She was one of the happiest, most patient, most enthusiastic people I have ever known.
I mean, she'd have to be, teaching elementary school music all these years.
This world makes no sense on days like this, when you hear news like this. It's been over twenty years since I moved on from the Children's School, where Darlene taught, but I still think of her as "my" music teacher. Always have, always will. And just like anybody does, memory freezes the way a person looks, so in your mind's eye, they never change from the last time you were around them lots. The thing of it is, the last time I saw Ms. Sitler, Shane and I were at the elementary school, doing dental exams, and Ms. Sitler peeked her head in the room and said 'hello!' She hadn't changed a bit from the last day I was in sixth grade, in 1990. How about that! I would have liked to have more time to visit with her, to catch up, but we had kids' teeth to document, and she had kids' talents to inspire and encourage.
Just this morning, while Zoe and I were down in the gym, cleaning up from my workout, Zoe got fussy, so I started singing her a song Ms. Sitler had taught my class way back in kindergarten ("I like to eat! I like to eat-eat! I like to eat-eat apples 'n' bananas!"), and Zoe stopped fussing and a big smile broke across her face, and she started dancing. A few hours later, I saw something on my Facebook feed about a shooting in Coudersport, and then after that, I couldn't stop stalking the story to find out who, and what happened, and when, and where.
I really wish I could rewind back to this morning, when I was singing that song to Zoe that made her stop in her tracks, smile, and dance, when I said "when you go to kindergarten, Ms. Sitler will teach YOU this song!" and have it be true. I wish we could all wake up from this mess and have it never have happened.
I can't make this make sense, even in my head. It's not because it's just "too soon." This doesn't make sense. I can't and won't package the breathtaking senselessness into some pithy comment. There are so many things I'd like to say about the ex-husband who shot her, but I didn't know him.
I hate that lives come with a hard-end like this. I hate it. But instead of focusing on this hard-end and letting this define Darlene J. Sitler forever in my mind, I want to remember My Music Teacher.
The only way I would have believed that Ms. Sitler was fifty-three is that I remember that I started kindergarten in 1983, and Ms. Sitler was my very first music teacher. She couldn't have been teaching for very long- '83 could have possibly been her rookie year. You wouldn't have known it, though. She greeted my kindergarten class- eighteen boys and six girls- with enthusiasm on our first day of music class. If I'd have known the word back then, the word I would have used to describe her was "a dynamo!!!" exclamation points intentional. She was this petite woman with big almond-shaped brown eyes, and dark curly hair. I remember that day she wore a plaid A-line skirt and a blouse with a floppy tied bow (it was 1983), and... high heels! I remember what Ms. Sitler wore, because I remember thinking "I want to dress just like Ms. Sitler when I grow up!" After 1983 until I was well into high school, she kept her hair in a pixie cut, which really suited her, and as I was usually a short-hair girl, I remember feeling a lot better about my own pixie-cuts, because Ms. Sitler always looked so stylish with her close-cropped hair.
She made the library/art room/music room at the Harrison Valley Elementary School feel just like home!
Now, music class is neat enough to a kindergartener. I mean, you just get to go into the music room and sing and clap your hands?! Awesome sauce! But then a magical thing happened. A couple weeks into the schoolyear, Ms. Sitler broke out the box of rhythm sticks, followed by the sandpaper blocks, little miniature cymbals, castanets, maracas, the guiro, and.... THE TRIANGLES!!!
Just at Zoe's birthday party a couple months ago, Colleen and I got laughing like idiots, because Colleen and Lorentz got Zoe a set of musical instruments much like those Ms. Sitler brought to my kindergarten class. In it was a triangle, and I related the story about the day Ms. Sitler brought twenty-four triangles for my kindergarten class, and before she let any of us grab them up in our grubby little mitts, she said "Now, *this* is how you play this musical instrument," and she demonstrated by rapping the metal triangle smartly with the mallet on one of its metal legs, producing a melodious ring. "You don't just run your mallet around the inside of the triangle like *this*," and she proceeded to ding the mallet around the inside of the triangle the way one would clang a dinnerbell hanging on the ranch porch, which of course was the way all of us kindergarteners had seen triangles used. Did we promise not to clang the triangles like dinner-bells? Of course, Ms. Sitler! We won't clang our triangles like dinner-bells!
She handed out the triangles, all two-dozen of them, and we all waited for her cue to rap our triangles smartly on one of the metal legs to produce a melodious ring.
But almost as though it were on-cue, twenty-four kindergarteners clanged the daylights out of our dinnerbells. I mean triangles. I think one little kid who was on his second run-through of Grade K even called out "Come to the table!" while happily clanging his triangle.
Ms. Sitler let us get it out of our systems, the cacophonous clanging, before ensuring that we could, in fact play our triangles the right way!
Halloween was another opportunity for surprise. The music class day nearest Halloween found us meeting Ms. Sitler in the appointed room, and she had ... an autoharp. She turned out all the lights in the room and sat down to play us a special song while she strummed the autoharp:
There was an old woman, all skin and bones
Ooooooo-oooooo-oooo-ooooo
Who lived beside an old graveyard
Oooooooo-woooooooo-ooooo-oooo
The song ends when she opens a door and "BOO!" with just a loud, dischord on the autoharp. I swear I wet my pants a little at the end of the song, when Ms. Sitler went "Boo!" Maybe I wasn't the only one. We ALLLL jumped a little, eighteen boys and six girls.
When our elementary school closed and we headed up to the school on the hill, we learned more things in music class. Ms. Sitler had hand-drawn and laminated flashcards to teach us how to interpret rhythm (quarter notes and eighth notes) "Ball, Ball, Bas-ket Ball!" "Chain, Chain, Dai-sy Chain!" There were other ones, but I don't remember them as well as "Basket Ball" and "Daisy Chain."
In third grade, we got our first taste of Real Musical Instruments, with music we had to read, when out came the white and red plastic Flutofones. Now, looking back, the Flutofones are what convince me that Ms. Sitler was one of the most patient people to walk on this planet. Do you know what a Flutofone sounds like? At their best, they're kind of reedy and shrill. Novice third-graders can't play Flutofones at their best. The noise of them still haunts me. But Ms. Sitler handled the Flutofone Unit with grace and aplomb, every year, every third grade class. The Intermediate Recorder units exposed about the same level of talent and skill, but with a slightly different tone quality.
For those of us who opted in to elementary band and chorus, elementary band, especially, Ms. Sitler demonstrated an even greater capacity for patience, enthusiasm, and encouragement. Now, I have no doubt that elementary chorus really DID sound as much like a choir of angelic voices, as much as we imagined we did. But elementary band... let's be honest. Elementary band is another matter entirely. No matter how great a musician the music teacher is herself, no matter how well she teaches her students to play their instruments, no matter how well she inspires them to really practice their 15 minutes a day, there's a level of playing ability that is the threshold. There's a place that most elementary school musicians get to that is the best they can do for a little while, and even when they reach it, there's a crop of fourth-grade rookies to be contended with. Elementary school bands have their own sound. The boom-chuck of the percussion, the very pronounced notes, the larger-than-life slurs. Accented notes are ACCENTED!!! Multiple-measure rests are counted out with a tapping foot and not-at-all subtle mouthing "One-two-three-four, TWO-two-three-four..." There's almost always a "cha-cha-cha" stinger on the end of every song. It's just the way it is, and that's great!
And no matter how awful we'd sound, Ms. Sitler would smile as we were packing up our instruments at the end of band practice and call out "Excellent rehearsal!" It wasn't disingenuous. It was encouraging. Because in elementary school, everybody's talent is embryonic, and you don't snuff out somebody's light before they're even twelve years old. That's what high school's for!
Another thing about Ms. Sitler that I touched on earlier, was that she was one of the most stylish ladies I knew, especially in elementary school. Even back when I was in elementary school, Potter County was a casual place to live. I don't think our school had "jeans Fridays," but instead we had "jeans any day you want to wear 'em" for the teachers. I don't remember seeing Ms. Sitler in jeans much, if ever. Dresses and skirts, stylish sweaters, leggings, yes. She had a knack of being current and up-to-date with her style, so she wouldn't have looked like a hillbilly in other locales besides our school in the cornfield on a hill, without being so cutting-edge that she'd alienate us hillbillies who lived in jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers. I guess when you come right down to it, Ms. Sitler had a very strong sense of style, rather than being swayed by fashion.
And then there were her SHOES!!! Her shoes were one of the first things I noticed about her, when I was a kindergartener. Boy, she must have had some shoe collection! I don't think they were anything like Carrie Bradshaw's Manolos, but it was fun to see which shoes Ms. Sitler wore, any given day. I remember being really irritated with my mom one day in sixth grade, for making me wear my snow boots to school, and bring my regular-shoes to change into (they took up valuable space in my backpack, and I was horsing home every school book as well as a French horn!), and when I went to the music room for band practice, I saw tucked under Ms. Sitler's desk a pair of black snowboots with faux-fur peeking out of the tops! Ms. Sitler wore snowboots to school then changed into her cute shoes! Well, then. If Ms. Sitler could wear snowboots to school, I didn't need to feel like a dork when I did!
When I got to high school, whenever I'd buy new shoes (a lot of my allowance money went to buy cheap shoes back then), I'd always run a prospective pair through a "Ms. Sitler Test." Would Ms. Sitler wear these shoes, if she were a high schooler? Yes? Well, okay! Ring me up a pair in each color! One day when my sister was still in elementary school, and I was in eighth or ninth grade, I'd slogged up to the elementary school from the high school, on a sloppy, wet, nasty day, for Girl Scouts or some such nonsense, and as I trudged through the front doors of the school, Ms. Sitler was on her way out for the night. She stopped in her tracks and said in her characteristic enthusiastic voice, "I LOVE those boots!" and then continued on her way out to the parking lot while I had trouble getting my big head through the school doors, swollen up by a compliment from MY style icon! They were neat boots. They were blue rubber boots, and they were technically my mom's. I hijacked them that morning, and after Ms. Sitler said she LOVED them, my mom had a hard time getting them back from me!
It's going to take a long time to come to terms with losing Ms. Sitler the way we did. Our school and our community is never going to be the same. For such a petite, pixie-like woman, she's leaving a huge, open void behind. She was a dynamo. She was beloved. She was so much bigger than how her life's book of Revelation was written. Thousands of kids who grew up to be adults will teach their kids the songs Ms. Sitler used to sing. Thousands of adults who were kids who'd pee themselves a little bit when Ms. Sitler would get to the end of "There Was an Old Woman All Skin and Bones" will sing that song to THEIR kids, with or without an autoharp. (WITH the autoharp is much better, I'm sure!) Ms. Sitler encouraged THOUSANDS of us to follow our dreams, to practice for fifteen minutes every day, not to get discouraged if, after counting out all the beats in a multi-measure rest, you forgot to make your big re-entrance in the song.
THOUSANDS of us are better for having had Darlene Sitler in our lives during elementary school. She was one of the brightest lights, and now we all have a little of that light in us, too. I think the best way we can honor Our Music Teacher is not to let the awful ending to her story define her, but instead remember all the ways she touched our lives. And if we can, encourage each other to be our best. Teach our kids her songs. ENCOURAGE kids. Tell people just what they mean to you, before they're gone. Fan up the little bit of her light that's in us all until all the darkness is gone, until every corner is lit.
Ms. Sitler, I will NEVER forget you. I wish YOU were here to teach Zoe your songs, but I'll teach them to her the best I can. I'll scare the bejeebers out of her at Halloween with the "Skin and Bones" song, and sing "Turkey trot-trot-trot, across the lot-lot-lot" with her at Thanksgiving. Maybe someday, she'll be like us and play the French horn, although I think she's a percussionist at heart. She loves to play the dinnerbell. I mean triangle. But I'll teach her the right way, someday. Maybe if you get a minute while you're Up There, you could take a listen. We'll be listening for glimpses of you!
Love,
April W.
I mean, she'd have to be, teaching elementary school music all these years.
This world makes no sense on days like this, when you hear news like this. It's been over twenty years since I moved on from the Children's School, where Darlene taught, but I still think of her as "my" music teacher. Always have, always will. And just like anybody does, memory freezes the way a person looks, so in your mind's eye, they never change from the last time you were around them lots. The thing of it is, the last time I saw Ms. Sitler, Shane and I were at the elementary school, doing dental exams, and Ms. Sitler peeked her head in the room and said 'hello!' She hadn't changed a bit from the last day I was in sixth grade, in 1990. How about that! I would have liked to have more time to visit with her, to catch up, but we had kids' teeth to document, and she had kids' talents to inspire and encourage.
Just this morning, while Zoe and I were down in the gym, cleaning up from my workout, Zoe got fussy, so I started singing her a song Ms. Sitler had taught my class way back in kindergarten ("I like to eat! I like to eat-eat! I like to eat-eat apples 'n' bananas!"), and Zoe stopped fussing and a big smile broke across her face, and she started dancing. A few hours later, I saw something on my Facebook feed about a shooting in Coudersport, and then after that, I couldn't stop stalking the story to find out who, and what happened, and when, and where.
I really wish I could rewind back to this morning, when I was singing that song to Zoe that made her stop in her tracks, smile, and dance, when I said "when you go to kindergarten, Ms. Sitler will teach YOU this song!" and have it be true. I wish we could all wake up from this mess and have it never have happened.
I can't make this make sense, even in my head. It's not because it's just "too soon." This doesn't make sense. I can't and won't package the breathtaking senselessness into some pithy comment. There are so many things I'd like to say about the ex-husband who shot her, but I didn't know him.
I hate that lives come with a hard-end like this. I hate it. But instead of focusing on this hard-end and letting this define Darlene J. Sitler forever in my mind, I want to remember My Music Teacher.
The only way I would have believed that Ms. Sitler was fifty-three is that I remember that I started kindergarten in 1983, and Ms. Sitler was my very first music teacher. She couldn't have been teaching for very long- '83 could have possibly been her rookie year. You wouldn't have known it, though. She greeted my kindergarten class- eighteen boys and six girls- with enthusiasm on our first day of music class. If I'd have known the word back then, the word I would have used to describe her was "a dynamo!!!" exclamation points intentional. She was this petite woman with big almond-shaped brown eyes, and dark curly hair. I remember that day she wore a plaid A-line skirt and a blouse with a floppy tied bow (it was 1983), and... high heels! I remember what Ms. Sitler wore, because I remember thinking "I want to dress just like Ms. Sitler when I grow up!" After 1983 until I was well into high school, she kept her hair in a pixie cut, which really suited her, and as I was usually a short-hair girl, I remember feeling a lot better about my own pixie-cuts, because Ms. Sitler always looked so stylish with her close-cropped hair.
She made the library/art room/music room at the Harrison Valley Elementary School feel just like home!
Now, music class is neat enough to a kindergartener. I mean, you just get to go into the music room and sing and clap your hands?! Awesome sauce! But then a magical thing happened. A couple weeks into the schoolyear, Ms. Sitler broke out the box of rhythm sticks, followed by the sandpaper blocks, little miniature cymbals, castanets, maracas, the guiro, and.... THE TRIANGLES!!!
Just at Zoe's birthday party a couple months ago, Colleen and I got laughing like idiots, because Colleen and Lorentz got Zoe a set of musical instruments much like those Ms. Sitler brought to my kindergarten class. In it was a triangle, and I related the story about the day Ms. Sitler brought twenty-four triangles for my kindergarten class, and before she let any of us grab them up in our grubby little mitts, she said "Now, *this* is how you play this musical instrument," and she demonstrated by rapping the metal triangle smartly with the mallet on one of its metal legs, producing a melodious ring. "You don't just run your mallet around the inside of the triangle like *this*," and she proceeded to ding the mallet around the inside of the triangle the way one would clang a dinnerbell hanging on the ranch porch, which of course was the way all of us kindergarteners had seen triangles used. Did we promise not to clang the triangles like dinner-bells? Of course, Ms. Sitler! We won't clang our triangles like dinner-bells!
She handed out the triangles, all two-dozen of them, and we all waited for her cue to rap our triangles smartly on one of the metal legs to produce a melodious ring.
But almost as though it were on-cue, twenty-four kindergarteners clanged the daylights out of our dinnerbells. I mean triangles. I think one little kid who was on his second run-through of Grade K even called out "Come to the table!" while happily clanging his triangle.
Ms. Sitler let us get it out of our systems, the cacophonous clanging, before ensuring that we could, in fact play our triangles the right way!
Halloween was another opportunity for surprise. The music class day nearest Halloween found us meeting Ms. Sitler in the appointed room, and she had ... an autoharp. She turned out all the lights in the room and sat down to play us a special song while she strummed the autoharp:
There was an old woman, all skin and bones
Ooooooo-oooooo-oooo-ooooo
Who lived beside an old graveyard
Oooooooo-woooooooo-ooooo-oooo
The song ends when she opens a door and "BOO!" with just a loud, dischord on the autoharp. I swear I wet my pants a little at the end of the song, when Ms. Sitler went "Boo!" Maybe I wasn't the only one. We ALLLL jumped a little, eighteen boys and six girls.
When our elementary school closed and we headed up to the school on the hill, we learned more things in music class. Ms. Sitler had hand-drawn and laminated flashcards to teach us how to interpret rhythm (quarter notes and eighth notes) "Ball, Ball, Bas-ket Ball!" "Chain, Chain, Dai-sy Chain!" There were other ones, but I don't remember them as well as "Basket Ball" and "Daisy Chain."
In third grade, we got our first taste of Real Musical Instruments, with music we had to read, when out came the white and red plastic Flutofones. Now, looking back, the Flutofones are what convince me that Ms. Sitler was one of the most patient people to walk on this planet. Do you know what a Flutofone sounds like? At their best, they're kind of reedy and shrill. Novice third-graders can't play Flutofones at their best. The noise of them still haunts me. But Ms. Sitler handled the Flutofone Unit with grace and aplomb, every year, every third grade class. The Intermediate Recorder units exposed about the same level of talent and skill, but with a slightly different tone quality.
For those of us who opted in to elementary band and chorus, elementary band, especially, Ms. Sitler demonstrated an even greater capacity for patience, enthusiasm, and encouragement. Now, I have no doubt that elementary chorus really DID sound as much like a choir of angelic voices, as much as we imagined we did. But elementary band... let's be honest. Elementary band is another matter entirely. No matter how great a musician the music teacher is herself, no matter how well she teaches her students to play their instruments, no matter how well she inspires them to really practice their 15 minutes a day, there's a level of playing ability that is the threshold. There's a place that most elementary school musicians get to that is the best they can do for a little while, and even when they reach it, there's a crop of fourth-grade rookies to be contended with. Elementary school bands have their own sound. The boom-chuck of the percussion, the very pronounced notes, the larger-than-life slurs. Accented notes are ACCENTED!!! Multiple-measure rests are counted out with a tapping foot and not-at-all subtle mouthing "One-two-three-four, TWO-two-three-four..." There's almost always a "cha-cha-cha" stinger on the end of every song. It's just the way it is, and that's great!
And no matter how awful we'd sound, Ms. Sitler would smile as we were packing up our instruments at the end of band practice and call out "Excellent rehearsal!" It wasn't disingenuous. It was encouraging. Because in elementary school, everybody's talent is embryonic, and you don't snuff out somebody's light before they're even twelve years old. That's what high school's for!
Another thing about Ms. Sitler that I touched on earlier, was that she was one of the most stylish ladies I knew, especially in elementary school. Even back when I was in elementary school, Potter County was a casual place to live. I don't think our school had "jeans Fridays," but instead we had "jeans any day you want to wear 'em" for the teachers. I don't remember seeing Ms. Sitler in jeans much, if ever. Dresses and skirts, stylish sweaters, leggings, yes. She had a knack of being current and up-to-date with her style, so she wouldn't have looked like a hillbilly in other locales besides our school in the cornfield on a hill, without being so cutting-edge that she'd alienate us hillbillies who lived in jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers. I guess when you come right down to it, Ms. Sitler had a very strong sense of style, rather than being swayed by fashion.
And then there were her SHOES!!! Her shoes were one of the first things I noticed about her, when I was a kindergartener. Boy, she must have had some shoe collection! I don't think they were anything like Carrie Bradshaw's Manolos, but it was fun to see which shoes Ms. Sitler wore, any given day. I remember being really irritated with my mom one day in sixth grade, for making me wear my snow boots to school, and bring my regular-shoes to change into (they took up valuable space in my backpack, and I was horsing home every school book as well as a French horn!), and when I went to the music room for band practice, I saw tucked under Ms. Sitler's desk a pair of black snowboots with faux-fur peeking out of the tops! Ms. Sitler wore snowboots to school then changed into her cute shoes! Well, then. If Ms. Sitler could wear snowboots to school, I didn't need to feel like a dork when I did!
When I got to high school, whenever I'd buy new shoes (a lot of my allowance money went to buy cheap shoes back then), I'd always run a prospective pair through a "Ms. Sitler Test." Would Ms. Sitler wear these shoes, if she were a high schooler? Yes? Well, okay! Ring me up a pair in each color! One day when my sister was still in elementary school, and I was in eighth or ninth grade, I'd slogged up to the elementary school from the high school, on a sloppy, wet, nasty day, for Girl Scouts or some such nonsense, and as I trudged through the front doors of the school, Ms. Sitler was on her way out for the night. She stopped in her tracks and said in her characteristic enthusiastic voice, "I LOVE those boots!" and then continued on her way out to the parking lot while I had trouble getting my big head through the school doors, swollen up by a compliment from MY style icon! They were neat boots. They were blue rubber boots, and they were technically my mom's. I hijacked them that morning, and after Ms. Sitler said she LOVED them, my mom had a hard time getting them back from me!
It's going to take a long time to come to terms with losing Ms. Sitler the way we did. Our school and our community is never going to be the same. For such a petite, pixie-like woman, she's leaving a huge, open void behind. She was a dynamo. She was beloved. She was so much bigger than how her life's book of Revelation was written. Thousands of kids who grew up to be adults will teach their kids the songs Ms. Sitler used to sing. Thousands of adults who were kids who'd pee themselves a little bit when Ms. Sitler would get to the end of "There Was an Old Woman All Skin and Bones" will sing that song to THEIR kids, with or without an autoharp. (WITH the autoharp is much better, I'm sure!) Ms. Sitler encouraged THOUSANDS of us to follow our dreams, to practice for fifteen minutes every day, not to get discouraged if, after counting out all the beats in a multi-measure rest, you forgot to make your big re-entrance in the song.
THOUSANDS of us are better for having had Darlene Sitler in our lives during elementary school. She was one of the brightest lights, and now we all have a little of that light in us, too. I think the best way we can honor Our Music Teacher is not to let the awful ending to her story define her, but instead remember all the ways she touched our lives. And if we can, encourage each other to be our best. Teach our kids her songs. ENCOURAGE kids. Tell people just what they mean to you, before they're gone. Fan up the little bit of her light that's in us all until all the darkness is gone, until every corner is lit.
Ms. Sitler, I will NEVER forget you. I wish YOU were here to teach Zoe your songs, but I'll teach them to her the best I can. I'll scare the bejeebers out of her at Halloween with the "Skin and Bones" song, and sing "Turkey trot-trot-trot, across the lot-lot-lot" with her at Thanksgiving. Maybe someday, she'll be like us and play the French horn, although I think she's a percussionist at heart. She loves to play the dinnerbell. I mean triangle. But I'll teach her the right way, someday. Maybe if you get a minute while you're Up There, you could take a listen. We'll be listening for glimpses of you!
Love,
April W.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
It's a Mystery!
I'm a sucker for a mystery box or grab bag. I just can't help myself. Throw a bunch of leftover stuff in a box, slap a question mark on it, and price it under $50, and you're almost sure to get a bite. It's just terrible.
So this week, especially, Craftsy.com has been pimping their "Premium November Mystery Knitting Box" for just $40. It's regularly $100! And in return for two Jacksons and shipping, you get a box of premium knitting needles, notions, yarns, and other miscellany. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've almost ordered myself one or two of these wonders! Yeah, I said "or two." They're discounted sixty percent off, for Pete's sake! I put 'em in my shopping bag then remove 'em at the last second.
I've had mixed success with grab bags and mystery boxes. When Fire Mountain Gems and Beads clean out their bead bins, they throw the leftovers into one-pound bags of "Boss's Bead Bags," and I've come away with a bunch of really great beads and findings I wouldn't have bought, just looking through their catalog. Also, there's something that feeds my creative fire, sitting there sorting a big bag full of beads (because I'd buy multiple BBBs.) I got a lot of really cool things, to be sure, but I also bought a lot of broken bead bits and some beads that looked like they'd spent too much time hanging out at the bottom of the bead bin.
Then I fell for ModCloth's mystery assortment deal earlier this year. For $20, you'd tell them your size and they'd send you a bunch of clothing and accessories they were trying to get rid of. ModCloth is tricky for me. I'm more zaftig than a skinny-ass model, but I'm not really plus-size. Unless I were trying to be a model, in which case, I'm downright corpulent. Anyway, I should have known better. I'm thirty-four, and I think ModCloth caters to the twenty-five and under hipster set. I like their accessories, but the clothing rarely works out for me. So for my money, I came away with a hooded capelet that I might wear, maybe, a seafoam green strapless short dress that's too big for me up top, but almost just right on the bottom, a maroon blouson dress that maybe I'd wear if I were a little thinner, or if I wore maroon dresses, and a black and white short dress. The black's up top, the white's on the bottom. It's my personal way of living never to wear white on the bottom. Too much can go wrong. So in short, Zoe's dress-up box for when she's a little bigger got three, maybe four pieces richer.
Earlier this month, Thirty-One was having their Consultants'-Only Give One, Get One sale, where they sell off the things they've discontinued for really low prices, and then for every one of something I bought, they'd send a thermal tote to a military family. Cool thing, this GOGO sale. Included in the Consultant-Only sale, they had grab-bags for $25. I figured I couldn't go wrong, getting a Thirty-One grab-bag or two. I like everything Thirty-One, as evidenced by my signing on as a consultant. And I think for my $50, I made out pretty well. The only thing that leaves me scratching my head are the packages of Silly Bandz in Thirty-One-Themed Shapes. I never really got into the Silly Bandz craze, because I was over 8 when they were a hit, so I really don't get why Thirty-One had them in the first place, to necessitate discontinuing them and including them in the grab-bag. (They make decent hair-ties in a pinch. That's the nice thing I'll say.)
So back to Craftsy and this November Premium Knitters' Mystery Box of theirs that has me tweaking. There is the siren's call of the Mystery Box, and I admit it's pretty strong. But then. Just a month ago, I went through my ENTIRE yarn stash. It took me ALL DAMN DAY on the Friday after Frankenstorm. I received my first wasp bite, on the ankle, that day, but by the time that happened, I'd already thrown three tantrums at the mountain of yarn my husband carried down into the middle of the living room so I would sort it. The bullet point of this is that I have more than enough yarn. Yarn that I picked out myself, with my own judgement, with my own two hands, with at least an embryonic idea as to what I'd make out of that yarn I bought. And I know exactly which needles I like to use. Addi Turbo circulars, the interchangeable ones if I can, but the regular Addi Turbo circulars as long as I'm not making something huge like an afghan. As for notions, I have a certain kind of stitch marker I like, and the rest just kind of piss me off.
I don't need the damn Premium Knitter's Mystery Box from Craftsy.
The other thing that's stopped me dead in my tracks from buying Crafty's box of wonders (or two) is that in the last half of this year, I've been burnt twice with them and their "Mystery Knitalongs." The idea was you bought into the knit-along for $30, and they gave you access to the month's pattern and sent you enough yarn to complete the project. Disasters, both. The first one, in July, was this washed-out blue fingering weight yarn, meant to make a cowl with a tendril pattern knitted in. The yarn came in a hank, needing to be wound into a ball before I could knit (using both ends of the ball, no less, at once). I've balled many a hank of yarn, so I'm not beginner at that. But I must have pulled the end funny, because I didn't even make one revolution of my winder's handle when my yarn went from neat hank to WTF?! A tangled mess I've yet to sort out. I ended up making my OWN cowl, from a pattern in my head, with some NORO yarn, which was much prettier and more interesting to work than the yarn from Craftsy would have been, even if it hadn't have spontaneously exploded into a spaghetti monster within seconds of being taken out of the mailing envelope.
Then, because I'm thick-skulled, I gave it another go with the Craftsy Knitalong, this time in October. I sent in my $30, they sent me a skein of super-bulky yarn the color of the insides of a sweet potato. I have a lot of affection for the sweet potato, but not much time for super-bulky yarn. I went into the air when I got access to the pattern. It was meant to be a tight-fitting beanie, knit in the round with a cable running up the side.
Really? A whole entire beanie made from super-thick yarn, meant to fit an adult's head? I cast on and then read the reviews from the other unhappy knitalong participators, who'd finished their projects in one night (it was supposed to last the whole month!), and who ran out of yarn before getting to the end of their beanies, and those that did manage to work it out said the beanie was so stretched when worn that it was unattractive. I don't know what kind of pinhead that beanie (one size fits most) was supposed to fit, but I have a big head as adult heads go, so I knew my yarn had no chance as a beanie, so I knitted up a sweet potato-hued short scarf instead. There wasn't really enough yarn for even that, to be honest, and I didn't like the yarn much, working with it, or fiber-wise.
Remembering those incidents, it's easier to walk away from the promise of this November Premium Knitter's Mystery Box. Burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me. But then part of me says "but the third time's the charm!" There's a chance that I could wind up with a box of really, really good yarn this time around!
More likely, I'd wind up with fugly, impossible-to-work yarn, and needles I can't stand.
This time, I'm being a grown up and walking away. I'm not biting on the bait Craftsy has dangled in front of me. I'm going to distract myself by knitting up an afghan for the daughter of one of my best friends, hopefully in time to send it for her birthday at the end of the month, and then I have a red throw I promised to knit for another best friend and his partner- way back before I was expecting Zoe. And after that, there's an entire of attic of yarn for me and my Addi Turbos to work through. I don't need a Mystery Box this time around! I don't!
So this week, especially, Craftsy.com has been pimping their "Premium November Mystery Knitting Box" for just $40. It's regularly $100! And in return for two Jacksons and shipping, you get a box of premium knitting needles, notions, yarns, and other miscellany. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've almost ordered myself one or two of these wonders! Yeah, I said "or two." They're discounted sixty percent off, for Pete's sake! I put 'em in my shopping bag then remove 'em at the last second.
I've had mixed success with grab bags and mystery boxes. When Fire Mountain Gems and Beads clean out their bead bins, they throw the leftovers into one-pound bags of "Boss's Bead Bags," and I've come away with a bunch of really great beads and findings I wouldn't have bought, just looking through their catalog. Also, there's something that feeds my creative fire, sitting there sorting a big bag full of beads (because I'd buy multiple BBBs.) I got a lot of really cool things, to be sure, but I also bought a lot of broken bead bits and some beads that looked like they'd spent too much time hanging out at the bottom of the bead bin.
Then I fell for ModCloth's mystery assortment deal earlier this year. For $20, you'd tell them your size and they'd send you a bunch of clothing and accessories they were trying to get rid of. ModCloth is tricky for me. I'm more zaftig than a skinny-ass model, but I'm not really plus-size. Unless I were trying to be a model, in which case, I'm downright corpulent. Anyway, I should have known better. I'm thirty-four, and I think ModCloth caters to the twenty-five and under hipster set. I like their accessories, but the clothing rarely works out for me. So for my money, I came away with a hooded capelet that I might wear, maybe, a seafoam green strapless short dress that's too big for me up top, but almost just right on the bottom, a maroon blouson dress that maybe I'd wear if I were a little thinner, or if I wore maroon dresses, and a black and white short dress. The black's up top, the white's on the bottom. It's my personal way of living never to wear white on the bottom. Too much can go wrong. So in short, Zoe's dress-up box for when she's a little bigger got three, maybe four pieces richer.
Earlier this month, Thirty-One was having their Consultants'-Only Give One, Get One sale, where they sell off the things they've discontinued for really low prices, and then for every one of something I bought, they'd send a thermal tote to a military family. Cool thing, this GOGO sale. Included in the Consultant-Only sale, they had grab-bags for $25. I figured I couldn't go wrong, getting a Thirty-One grab-bag or two. I like everything Thirty-One, as evidenced by my signing on as a consultant. And I think for my $50, I made out pretty well. The only thing that leaves me scratching my head are the packages of Silly Bandz in Thirty-One-Themed Shapes. I never really got into the Silly Bandz craze, because I was over 8 when they were a hit, so I really don't get why Thirty-One had them in the first place, to necessitate discontinuing them and including them in the grab-bag. (They make decent hair-ties in a pinch. That's the nice thing I'll say.)
So back to Craftsy and this November Premium Knitters' Mystery Box of theirs that has me tweaking. There is the siren's call of the Mystery Box, and I admit it's pretty strong. But then. Just a month ago, I went through my ENTIRE yarn stash. It took me ALL DAMN DAY on the Friday after Frankenstorm. I received my first wasp bite, on the ankle, that day, but by the time that happened, I'd already thrown three tantrums at the mountain of yarn my husband carried down into the middle of the living room so I would sort it. The bullet point of this is that I have more than enough yarn. Yarn that I picked out myself, with my own judgement, with my own two hands, with at least an embryonic idea as to what I'd make out of that yarn I bought. And I know exactly which needles I like to use. Addi Turbo circulars, the interchangeable ones if I can, but the regular Addi Turbo circulars as long as I'm not making something huge like an afghan. As for notions, I have a certain kind of stitch marker I like, and the rest just kind of piss me off.
I don't need the damn Premium Knitter's Mystery Box from Craftsy.
The other thing that's stopped me dead in my tracks from buying Crafty's box of wonders (or two) is that in the last half of this year, I've been burnt twice with them and their "Mystery Knitalongs." The idea was you bought into the knit-along for $30, and they gave you access to the month's pattern and sent you enough yarn to complete the project. Disasters, both. The first one, in July, was this washed-out blue fingering weight yarn, meant to make a cowl with a tendril pattern knitted in. The yarn came in a hank, needing to be wound into a ball before I could knit (using both ends of the ball, no less, at once). I've balled many a hank of yarn, so I'm not beginner at that. But I must have pulled the end funny, because I didn't even make one revolution of my winder's handle when my yarn went from neat hank to WTF?! A tangled mess I've yet to sort out. I ended up making my OWN cowl, from a pattern in my head, with some NORO yarn, which was much prettier and more interesting to work than the yarn from Craftsy would have been, even if it hadn't have spontaneously exploded into a spaghetti monster within seconds of being taken out of the mailing envelope.
Then, because I'm thick-skulled, I gave it another go with the Craftsy Knitalong, this time in October. I sent in my $30, they sent me a skein of super-bulky yarn the color of the insides of a sweet potato. I have a lot of affection for the sweet potato, but not much time for super-bulky yarn. I went into the air when I got access to the pattern. It was meant to be a tight-fitting beanie, knit in the round with a cable running up the side.
Really? A whole entire beanie made from super-thick yarn, meant to fit an adult's head? I cast on and then read the reviews from the other unhappy knitalong participators, who'd finished their projects in one night (it was supposed to last the whole month!), and who ran out of yarn before getting to the end of their beanies, and those that did manage to work it out said the beanie was so stretched when worn that it was unattractive. I don't know what kind of pinhead that beanie (one size fits most) was supposed to fit, but I have a big head as adult heads go, so I knew my yarn had no chance as a beanie, so I knitted up a sweet potato-hued short scarf instead. There wasn't really enough yarn for even that, to be honest, and I didn't like the yarn much, working with it, or fiber-wise.
Remembering those incidents, it's easier to walk away from the promise of this November Premium Knitter's Mystery Box. Burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me. But then part of me says "but the third time's the charm!" There's a chance that I could wind up with a box of really, really good yarn this time around!
More likely, I'd wind up with fugly, impossible-to-work yarn, and needles I can't stand.
This time, I'm being a grown up and walking away. I'm not biting on the bait Craftsy has dangled in front of me. I'm going to distract myself by knitting up an afghan for the daughter of one of my best friends, hopefully in time to send it for her birthday at the end of the month, and then I have a red throw I promised to knit for another best friend and his partner- way back before I was expecting Zoe. And after that, there's an entire of attic of yarn for me and my Addi Turbos to work through. I don't need a Mystery Box this time around! I don't!
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