Teachers

Thanks to my mom, who meticulously filled out my baby book and my school year journal, I jnow exactly who all of my teachers were throughout elementary school!

I was not so thoughtful.  I shoved items of interest between blank pages with every intention of going back to fill out each entry for each year.  I could have answered each question;  Who was my teacher? Who were my friends?  What did I like to eat for lunch, or What was my favorite subject?  Now that my son is a sophomore in college, it sees to be a missed opportunity.  Not that I think he will be all that disappointed anyway.  Considering how sentimental I am, I managed to raise a wildly pragmatic kid.  I blame his father.

I do have memories of my various teachers.  Accuracy is not guaranteed, but the memories are there.  I did not attend preschool except for the occasional stays at the daycare at the YWCA (I think it was the Y, anyway.  Remember accuracy is debatable here), so I did not have a consistent teacher until Kindergarten.  My Kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Freeman who I remember as a heavy set lady who was  little scary to me.  I'm sure she was perfectly lovely, but this was my first foray into academia and it was scary in general.

I had to ride the bus, and in the days when children weren't taught to read until first grade, we relied on strips of color coded construction paper to get us to the right bus after school.  I recall some man asking me where I lived in order to verify that our colored strips were accurate.  My strip was green, and my mom had drilled into my head that I was to get on the green bus.  When I dutifully gave the man my address, he took my green strip and said something vaguely disparaging about my mother being mistaken about which bus I should take to get home.  .  I think he gave me different colored strip of paper, but I still boarded the green bus.  I never doubted that my mom was correct, and sure enough I made it back to the stop in front of our little ranch house.  My mom must have seen the incorrect color strip, because I told her the story and what the man had said.  I recall, her expression and understood that my mom was none too pleased with the backhanded insult to her intelligence. I, however, never once doubted that my mom was way smarter than some random color strip checker!

After Kindergarten, who moved to St. Louis requiring a transfer to a new school.  My teacher was Mrs. Burney.   I have a clear memory of looking at a page of a Humpty Dumpty magazine as my om read it to me.  I thought "How on earth do you get words out of those strange squiggles?"  I'm sure I knew the alphabet, but did not translate that those squiggles were letters..  (Just as a brief digression; I love Humpty Dumpty magazine.  I was very excited every time it came.  One arrive on the same day that my mother returned from the hosital with my new infant brother.  When my sister got home from school that day, I ran to greet her saying "We got a new Humpty Dumpty magazine...and Mom came home from the hospital.  I am going to sick to the idea that I was saving the best news for last...)

Mrs. Burney taught me to read.  I finally was able to decipher those squiggles.  I think I graduated from picture books to chapter books very quickly after that and have enjoyed words very much since then.   Thanks Mrs. Burney!

I want to scan some pictures from that time, but it will have to wait till I figure out how to set up my new scanner.  Pics will come next time