School days continued

My fourth grade teacher was Mrs. Stroessner.  Or I should say she was my teacher for most of the year.  Mrs. Stroessner had a baby and moved to Jefferson city.  This was probably when I began to realize that teacher were human beings with lives outside of the classroom.  I think, other than that, fourth grade was rather uneventful.

 My mind remembers the strangest things!  I have a clear memory of finding out about Mrs. Stressner's pregnancy at the class Christmas party.  Everyone participated in the gift exchange and everyone brought a present for the teacher.  My mom, having been a teacher, understood the importance of NOT giving teachers another "worlds greatest teacher" mug. We always gave the teacher stationary, which was useful for writing thank you notes for "World's greatest teacher" mugs.

One of the presents Mrs. Stroessner received that year was a toy bunny and some other baby related items.  I think she saw this as an opportunity to announce her pregnancy.  I am sure I have collapsed the two events (moving and having a baby) into a single announcement, but whatever the timeline, I knew she was moving on and I spent he rest of the day being sad.  After school I tearfully informed my sister of loosing my teacher to pregnancy and the move.  She told me I should be happy because having a baby was a miracle.  I thought, #1. No it's not and #2.  This was a stupid unhelpful thing to say.  I kept both of those thoughts to myself, of course.

The other thing I recall from that day is really odd. Everyone at school got a Christmas gift bag with candy, pencils, and other trinkets.  One of the items was a furry ornament with googly eyes, hung with a piece of elastic.  I immediately called a Bippy,  Remember on Rowen and Martin's Laugh-in how they used to say "You bet your sweet bippy"?  I'm sure they were not referring to a hairy ornament with googly eyes.  But the thing just seemed to be a bippy to me.  The odd thing about this is that I remember Beth (my sister) showing me her pink furry ornament (mine was yellow.  Why did she always get the good color?) and saying, "Look! I got a bippy!"   I distinctly remember thinking how weird it was that we both independently call these goofy things by the same name!  So while her advice regarding how to manage my feelings was trite and contrived, we still maintained our cosmic connection.!

The teacher who took over for Mrs. Stroessner was Mr. Hulsey.  A male teacher was a curiosity to me, but I remember that he was kind and funny.  The only thing that bugged me was how he pronounce the name Phoebe.  Mrs. Stressner had been reading a book aloud to the class as a sort of time filler I think.  She would read a chapter at the end of the day, and she was about half way through when she left.  The main character's name was Phoebe, but Mr. Hulsey pronounced it
 Ph-o-be with a long O sound.  We were too polite to correct him, of course, even though I am sure I am not the only one who noticed!

So now, not only was I aware that teachers were actually real people with real lives, I also realized that they were fallible, too.  So maybe fourth grade wasn't as uneventful as I thought!