Any favorite teachers?
From this year, I remember two things: One was when we were studying the human body and Mrs. Byrnes stood at the front of the class and put her palms under her chest and moved them up and down and asked, "What do we call these two air bags?" Of course, she meant lungs, but the boys became apoplectic thinking that she could be talking about boobies. One kid literally was so beside himself with the thought of boobies that he fell off his chair. And Mrs. Byrnes kept referring to them as "big air bags" -- I don't know if she ever caught on.
The second thing that stands out is that we were in a building that had no cafeteria. The school had burned down and so we were in this manor house on an old estate and we had to eat lunch in our room. In those days, teachers were more supervisory and Mrs. Byrnes would monitor whether you were eating your lunch and urging kids to be members of the clean plate club. Every so often a kid would say that they only eat x food with ketchup or mustard or some spice.
One day Mrs. Byrnes threatened to get a big basket of spices and condiments so when a kid protested that he or she only ate a certain food with a certain condiment that she'd have it available to make the kid eat their lunch. For some reason, that idea appealed to me.
Of course, I was enthralled with teachers. I remember the excitement of seeing cigarettes in a teacher's purse -- such a window into the fact that they actually had private lives. I remember being in second grade, I think, and walking past the teacher's lounge (I was the one the teacher trusted to bring a paper to the office) and the door was opening as I walked by -- the teacher's lounge was the sancto sanctarium (or however that's spelled) -- meaning the inner, mystic secret room -- in any event, as the door was opening just as I walked past, I heard a toilet flush and I literally was stunned that teachers actually went to the toilet.
2 comments:
Wow. You had teacher worship BAD! ; ) I'll never forget Mrs. Pasternak, second grade. I was standing quietly at her desk asking her something and the class was particularly unruly behind me, and she blurted out, "I wish you were all more like Amy L.!" Well, all I could think of was melting into a puddle under her desk and disappearing--aggghh. How COULD she single me out like that?!
This reminds me of a comment that David Brooks made in a TV interview recently, which really stuck with me: he said that if you look at all the variables determining which kids would make it and which wouldn't, the single factor is if they have an answer to the question: "Who was your favorite teacher?" Kids who don't have an answer, who think that question is crazy, are the ones who drop out. (P.S., If Anonymous thinks YOU had it bad, what would she think of me? I always had a favorite teacher; I eventually MARRIED one of them.)
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