The Power of the Imperfect Teacher

When I returned to teaching children five years ago, my principal asked me if I thought I was a better teacher now than I’d been when I was younger. I told her no, that I was still pretty much the exact same teacher I was when I was thirty.

Aside from having some wisdom about children and how most of them turn out okay despite of our best interferences and also some amassed logical thought about how people actually learn, I do believe I'm basically the teacher I was years ago, one who was, and still is, incredibly imperfect and flawed.

And that, to my mature, long-view way of thinking, is a good thing.

In our American system, kids have an average of about twelve teachers through fifth grade, and then most likely a minimum of forty more from middle through high school. Just like everybody else, teachers come in all ages, shapes, sizes, colors, political leanings, and yes, sexual orientations. They also come with strengths and weaknesses and preferences and irritating habits and passions for things like kayaking or Sudoku or hairless cats.

Teachers also arrive with preferences and strengths and weaknesses when it comes to teaching itself. For example, my school has about fifty teachers. Some of those teachers are wonderful at creating a serene and ordered environment that makes kids feel safe and valued. Others are masters of planning and organization who never ever forget to teach a skill or a standard, or they are creative geniuses who think of new and interesting ways to make learning fun. Still others will travel all over Atlanta begging pizza parlors for boxes to use for fantastic projects. Then there are those who will stay late with a kid every afternoon until something sinks in, and one in particular who loves hands-on and minds-on learning to the point that he spends hundreds of dollars out of his own pocket each year so that his students have the games and manipulatives and learning materials they need for maximum understanding.

Although I do try to be the best teacher I can be, I’m not any of those people . I will never have the most well-behaved students or those with the prettiest handwriting. Very few of my kids will make perfect scores on achievement tests, nor will they walk in a perfect line to and from the lunchroom. What I do believe I’m good at is finding what each of my students is good at, whether that be drawing or telling a joke or being an excellent friend or break dancing or somersaulting while singing the Star Spangled Banner. I'm more interested in salvaging their little psyches than in molding their minds, I'm afraid. I, myself, am more heart than brain.  In addition, because my sense of what’s humorous arrested at about age eight, my second graders and I think the same things are extremely funny, something that, believe me, makes the grayest February day seem a bit more sunny.  

But it's not only our strengths that give the children we teach the gifts we have to offer; it's also our weaknesses and our crazy, not to mention irritating, foibles.  For example, I can't teach Science worth a darn so I have to get Starla, my scientific genius, to explain our solar system and the life cycle of a frog.  I also can't ever find anything so I need Katherine and Maddie to help me to organize myself.  Then there's the rest of my class who have to finish my sentences for me because I'm post menopausal and I've misplaced about 50% of my language synapses.  

However, my students are lucky to be learning that grown ups aren't always right and are, in fact, rather lame in some important areas, and that, I can tell you, is a learning worth learning for kids of all ages.

If teachers were electrically powered automatons or perfect humans, kids would lose out on so many things, like a grown up who will try to help them make a map of the world with macaroni no matter how incredibly stupid that idea is, or an adult who can't recall at just the right moment how many inches there are in a yard but will give the kid who can remember a high five and a very loud "thank you, Einstein!"

And the good thing is that, next year or maybe the next, my current students will get a teacher who loves Science or who truly believes that neatness counts or who sets firm rules they will learn to follow and believe in. And ultimately, all of the teachers those children have throughout time will help to give shape to the adults they will become, along with their own strengths and weaknesses and preferences and irritating habits and passions.

That, to my mind, is how it works.

The mother of one of my current students just sent me this email:

These children are making such strong friendships in your class.  You are making such lasting impressions on these young children.  They will remember you with love all their lives and will always have positive memories of second grade.  Thank you!

Notice she didn't mention anything about her child's improved handwriting or how well I taught our last Science Unit.  I'm afraid that praise will have to go to next year's teacher.

Doing God’s Work in the Middle of a Marathon

No, I wasn’t blessing the runners or handing out water or cleaning up the pukers. I was mainly sitting in my car and cursing. I am proud to say, however, that I wasn’t shooting the bird or arguing with the poor traffic cops like some of the other stuck-in-traffic pissed-off people.

I knew that the Georgia Marathon was going to be run on Sunday morning and that streets were going to be blocked. I had even checked the marathon map on my way out the door.  But, I still managed to get on the primary race route road.

You might have thought God would do a better job getting me to church. Maybe he’s a little busy right now, what with Japan and Libya, but still, here I was trying to do the right thing for once and I was getting very little support.

I am, at best, a sporadic church goer. I’ve belonged to my big city, open-doors-to-all-races-creeds-and-orientations United Methodist Church for six years now but I’ve just recently started going back. Our church is so open-minded, we occasionally have to prop up a snoozing homeless person so we can fit everyone into the pew.

Like many people, I vacillate on my beliefs about God and Jesus and Me, Myself, and I. However, I do believe that, if there is a God, when He isn’t Hanging out at the Beach, he’s Spending Time at St. Mark.

As good a person as I’m trying to be (which, come to think of it, it ain’t all that good), I would have certainly blown off church this morning because of how difficult it was going to be to get there.  Had it not been for Cheryl Thompson begging on Facebook for someone to take her place with the reading of the Old Testament Scripture during the 11:15 service, I would've been happily ensconced at home, surfing the net rather than sitting in traffic.

In a weak moment,  I told Cheryl I would take her place and, before I could change my mind, she sent me the passage in an email message (using a large script so I could decipher it). I read and re-read it out loud it like the instructions said to do, so that I wouldn’t stumble over those big bible-like words.

Because we are supposed to at least pretend we are reading from the Real Bible and not a large-lettered computer print-out, I found my mother’s old Bible, the one given to her by my father, who was the true believer in our family, someone who never ever, in my memory, questioned God. In that Bible, I found a newspaper article about my brother from when he finished Officer’s Training during the Vietnam War, something that reminded me, once again, about what a perfect child he was – the ass.

So, after all the reading and practicing and remembering and finding sensible shoes so I wouldn’t fall down climbing up to the pulpit, there I was stuck in traffic and not moving except when there was a lull in the lumbering mass. I thought, at that point, church would have to move on without me, or worse, all of those people, including the clergy, would just sit there wondering where the reading from Genesis had gone.

I finally made it into the sanctuary at 11:20 and, thank goodness, my friend, Katie, had saved me a seat. I didn’t even have to prop her up. After the children's sermon was done, I walked up to the front, remembering that you never want go on after kids.

But it turned out okay. I didn’t fall down and I read the scripture and I even got in a couple of jokes.

I’m not sure you’re supposed to tell jokes leading up to reading scripture but I believe God’s Work arrives in all kinds of presentation styles and I've definitely got my own style.

St. Patricia’s Day

It was 1991, and I was newly separated and living with my kids in a three bedroom apartment just a few miles from our old home. I was feeling optimistic about the future and wanted to take a stand for womanhood everywhere.

So I hosted a St. Patricia’s Day party on March 17th. Only my female friends were invited. Wait, I didn’t have any male friends. They all belonged to my husband.

At my party, I served canned corned beef and boiled cabbage and, for dessert, I’d had a grocery store cake decorated in green, with the inscription “Erin Go Braghless.”

I remember it being fun and I felt brave and free. That was twenty years ago.

These days I still feel free but often not so brave. I now know too much. However, I do feel a small ocean’s worth of compassion and love for the woman I was back then, a woman who would make quite a few mistakes, but a woman with enough courage (and cluelessness) to get up each morning and put on her shoes and start her day.

I’m still that same woman.

Happy St. Patricia’s Day.

This One's for You Again, Billy

I couldn’t possibly be pregnant. I already had a perfectly good baby.

We were living in your grandfather’s house, sleeping in the guest room that shared a wall with Doc’s giant Magnavox TV, which he kept ratcheted up to about 1000 decibels because he was deaf. On the other side of the other wall was Melissa’s crib, and outside our window was Henry, howling out his confusion and exasperation at being banned from the house. There was many a night I could be seen climbing out the window to throw something at the dog to hush him up without having to walk my nightgown-clad body past your grandfather in the den watching Johnny Carson. Through it all, your father just continued to saw logs. To this day, I can’t for the life of me figure out how I could have possibly gotten pregnant, but pregnant I got.

Born on the thirteenth of March, exactly two years and ten days after Melissa, you were a sweet baby, cute though rather odd looking with your cone shaped head from being so big and perhaps stuck in the birth canal for a bit too long. You were also an easy baby. After just one night of sleeping in Melissa’s room (“Mama, the baby’s crying!”), we moved you into the living room of our tiny house, where you stayed until we finally enclosed the carport to accommodate Daddy’s office.

By the time we moved into the big house, you and Melissa were pretty much inseparable, going to Children’s Friend each weekday, playing outside in the afternoon and watching C.H.I.P.S. and Night Rider in the evening. I was your kindergarten teacher and it was during that time you buddied up with Chris (like a lawn) Moore and a couple more little scalawags with whom you remained friends throughout high school. I loved being your teacher and your mama at the same time. I thought you were just about the cleverest kindergartener ever to build a block tower and then knock it over.

I still remember the drawings you did as a little boy, airplanes with prodigious amounts of cloud-like smoke spewing from their innards, and little round cars, often with one flat tire, which I think had typically been shot out. I now look back and wonder if those gimpy automobiles offered a glimpse into your personality and view of life, as if you expected good things seldom to be perfect. That probably came from having Melissa as your big sister. Remember the time when you watched that scary movie and she materialized and startled you at the top of the stairs? You were so horrified that you refused to go upstairs by yourself for the longest time. Putting my picture in that locket and that locket around your grimy little neck was most likely my finest moment as a parent. No boogie people could have survived a gander at that face and you knew it.

Your earliest birthday parties were in tandem with Melissa’s, mainly because I was cheap and tired. I particularly remember those at Dry Lake Park and Burger King. However, your most memorable party, not counting those as a teenager I don’t even want to think about, had to have been the spend-the-night one when the partiers tried to turn over Dianne’s mini van just after dark and then flew the balsa wood airplanes in the front yard at four in the morning. Was that the same one where Molly sat naked on the dining table during the birthday-candle-blowing-out?

On the Molly topic, it was when Molly came along that your life changed and I began to catch a glimpse of the man (and father) you would become. After getting over your disappointment about not having a little brother, you and she developed a bond that remains to this day. Just as Melissa helped form you, you did the same for Molly.

                                                                      

Notice your hand here. You

are making sure Molly doesn't

fall off the porch.

Despite that good old Warner Robins tradition, you were never much interested in sports. You played Little League and were pretty good; however, soccer drove you nuts as those other little boys just ran all over everywhere and didn’t stay in their assigned positions. The idea of random shenanigans seldom got in the way of your logical thinking and that hasn’t changed.

In middle school, when you halfheartedly joined the football team, I remember going to a game and complaining to your coach that he wasn’t letting you play. He told me every time you got to the front of the line and it looked like you might actually have to go onto the field, you’d disappear to the back. Again, to your way of thinking, being on the team was enough, especially since you got to wear that great green uniform. Actually playing, on the other hand, could have lead to injury.

Speaking of uniforms and perhaps a different type of machismo, you didn't fare particularly well in the one ROTC class you took in high school either, the one you failed, partially because, on the one day you deigned to wear that uniform, you sported a t-shirt which offered the notion that one should Play Naked Lacrosse in bold letters under it.

To this day, you are one of the few heterosexual men I know who isn’t interested in sports, and, in fact, you appear to consider this to be a badge of honor. When you moved to Portland, you did join a kickball team, which you continue to enjoy, at least the beer drinking part of it. It did turn out, however, that playing in a co-ed league was mostly just a ruse for meeting women, and we have kickball (at least in part) to thank for Mary and Cami.

I recall once, when you were around fourteen, you told me that I needed to make you tougher. We were standing in the kitchen; I remember it well. I felt so sad, so insufficient, so unable to do what you'd asked of me. I couldn’t play golf or throw a ball or even pee standing up. But, you know, like most things, it turned out just the way it should. Even though neither of us had what it took to make you into the Incredible Hulk, you turned out to be tough in all the ways that are important. You are steadfast and kind and loving and funny, ready to make a joke when you sister is being wheeled into surgery, determined to be at her bedside when she returns. You are a partner to Mary and a wonderful father to Cami. You are your own person, content to be the basement guy, happy with your wires and connections, caretaker of drunks and fools. You were definitely born into the right family.

Finally, since I do usually think of you in one of those t-shirts you still wear (and wear and wear), my final word on the Billy-factor will have to be that you are like one of your shirts: typically unconventional, occasionally tacky, and often spouting something outlandish. But, oh, what a comfort you are.

Still Vertical

I have a friend who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, and, after the earthquake there last week, I sent an email asking him to let me know that he was okay.

This was his response:

Bloody miracle really but still vertical.

I met Judith and Malcolm Tait my first year as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Southwestern State University. He was our Interim Vice President and she was on the adjunct faculty there.  I’d never met New Zealanders before and I don’t believe I’ve run into any since, but that’s okay because I had the chance to get to know the Taits. To first look at them, they seemed an oddly-matched set. Malcolm looked important; Judith looked like she seldom thought about how she looked. Together, they were a lovely couple, still interested in each other after more than forty years of marriage.

The Taits had spent much of their adult lives in the US, following Malcolm’s professional path. Along the way, they’d lived in New York, where he did his graduate work at Columbia, and then Hawaii, Ohio, and North Carolina, welcoming three sons born in various places. Americus, Georgia was to be their last stop before going back home to retire in New Zealand.

Judith and I bonded over books. She was the first to tell me about Harry Potter and Augustine Burroughs, with his crazy book, Running with Scissors. We also shared a love for liberal politics and cats. Malcolm and Judith had some of us over to their charming rented Victorian-era home on several occasions during the time we worked together and I was always struck by how much like them their rented house was, down to the baby grand in the music room. I remember when Judith cried after one of her cats was hit by a car and died. I also remember her giving me her other cat, Sheba, when they moved back to New Zealand some time around 2001.

Over the years I would hear from Malcolm and Judith.  Because all three of their boys lived in the US, they would come over to visit them and their grandkids.  We got together one time in Americus when they drove through.  After that, Judith would send letters and notes with that New Zealand airmail stamp; and, at least once a year, I would get a phone call from some strange number, a call  I wouldn't answer until around the third time it showed up on my phone and I picked it up out of pure curiosity.  Then I would hear, "Mahsha, is that you, Mahsha?  It's Judith Tait calling from New Zealand."  And off we would go with everything from family doings to international news.  It was as if we were back in the faculty lounge and not on opposite sides of the world.

At some point, I knew that Judith wasn't well, something about a hospital stay in the US in the midst of a trip to see the kids.  Then there was a while when I didn't hear; then a phone call from a strange number and "Mahsha, is that you, Mahsha? and it was Judith and she sounded good.

Ultimately, an email came to me from Malcolm in December of 2009 with the news that Judith had passed away.

Judith Tait gave me many gifts, including friendship, book recommendations, copious amounts of wine, and her cat.  But although I loved Sheba, the greatest gift Judith ever gave me arrived all wrapped up in her memories of growing up in New Zealand.  Before her death, she gathered those memories together in A Pretty Gumboot Show, a book she dictated with great courage and effort to her cousin, Ruth Alley.  

Those memories include:

Beginnings

I was born in a nursing home in a suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand.   I was the first born child of Geoffrey Thomas Alley, and Euphan Margaret Alley.  I was born in the latter hours of the day in the middle of the New Zealand summer and on the longest day of the year - the 22nd December 1931.

I have always been told that I inherited my Grandmother's complexion and her family, the Buckingham's build.  I had big broad bones and this was attributed to the Southland Buckinghams, who lived at Waikawa and who bred cattle of vast dimensions.  Thus, as a toddler, I was frequently described as 'one of those big Waikawa things'.

We moved back to 'Westcote' (outside of Christchurch) when my Grandfather died so that my father could help my Grandmother, Nanna.  We lived in The Jung.  This was a little cottage a short way away from the main house.  There was no water and no loo and it had three rooms.  It was called The Jung because a visiting family called it a bungalow and somehow this got mixed up with the jungle and then the Jungalow was invented and shortened to The Jung.

I have many, many vivid memories of my grandmother Nanna and she was an important influence in my life until after her death.....  I was a little girl during The Depression when many people were out of work, homeless and poor.  Unemployed people would travel the country looking for work and some of them turned up at 'Westcote'.  Nanna would never turn them away and always made sure they were fed and had shelter for the night or even a little work about the place. There were often strange people tucking into a bowl of porridge at the kitchen table and these people came to be known as 'Nanna's lame ducks'.  I remember Nanna's favourite black cat was called Paul after the American bass singer Paul Robeson.

Any time I think it's not worth the trouble to get my thoughts and memories down to share with my children and others, I need to think of Judith Tait and her gift.  Through her, I know something of a time and place I could have never known otherwise, and, because of her, I have a better understanding of people who live a world away from me, and that understanding is something I believe we all could use.

Judith died over a year ago, but Malcolm is still vertical, thank God.  Although I'm sure he's glad she hasn't been privy to the recent troubles in their beloved homeland,  I know he misses having her on this earth with him, offering a pithy comment or laughing at some absurdity.

 I certainly do.

To Melissa ~ a repost on her thirty-sixth birthday

 This was written a year ago but it still stands:

You were my first big hope, a miracle I couldn't engineer all by myself. After months of trying and failing, the planets aligned, the perfect swimmer met the ready egg, and you were conceived. I still have the little piece of paper that says "gravindex positive, " a folded memento your grandfather's nurse handed me the day I knew it was true. Back then, there were no magic sticks to wet on in the privacy of your own bathroom; people had to make an appointment to find out. Daddy and I were lucky your grandfather was a doctor and we could get in quickly for a test. We were living in Greenville at the time so we must have traveled back to Warner Robins, with you as our secret, to keep the process all in the family.

I still remember the peppermint flavor of that summer as peppermints were what I used to stave off the nausea. I also recall looking at myself in the full-length mirror you took to Oregon years later. I stood sideways and sucked in my stomach and saw and felt the hard knot that was you. I wonder now at not being able to foresee that the mirror which afforded me my first look at you would one day accompany you to the place that would steal you away from me.

We called you Boogie as we watched you, already a member of the Allman Brothers Fan Club, grow in my belly. We named you after the song that was a reminder of the music your daddy loved so much, and something I, in turn, loved about him .

From the very beginning, you were your own little person, often inwardly focused, occasionally cranky (if you can imagine that). Your need to create happened early on as we all recall your waking us up in the middle of the night asking where the scissors were. You accepted your siblings with resolve and some affection, taking on the mantle of oldest while still maintaining an air of being above it all, as if the promise had been that you would be the only one.

As a child, I remember your best friends as being boys, but what I'm recalling is most likely just that one summer, the summer of Greg and Sonny. You three were like a cyclone pulsating through the neighborhood, all grime and no homework. Some days, I couldn't tell you apart. You looked and smelled exactly the same.
When you became a teenager, with the height of your cock-a-doodle bangs signifying your mood, social endeavors dictated your days and nights but you still managed to do well in school and stay out of trouble (mostly). We had some issues with the car, the curfew, and that big party, but I could still count on you to snuggle up and ask me to scratch your back, and to put your big old feet in my lap when we watched television. Because you were my first teenager, I had to try to figure out how to continue to mother you after you thought it was no longer necessary. I still remember the times you were late enough for me to be scanning the driveway, mentally writing your very sad obituary, and I certainly haven't forgotten the rope and rubber gloves you used for climbing in and out of your second-story bedroom window.

It was while you were in college I began to realize how like my mother you are: intelligent, intense, and ready to travel to places I'd be afraid to go. The summer you and Molly Mitchell spent working in Yellowstone must have been a mighty one as it ended up changing your life. When you later told me you wanted to move to Oregon, I thought of it as a great adventure, never dreaming it would become your future (and to a great extent, mine).

Now you are a wife, a mother, a worker, a driver, a sewer, a maker, a coaxer, a car-seat buckler, and a cinematographer, but, thanks to Trevor, not a cook. You are also still a daughter to your daddy and me, and a sister to Billy and Molly, and a friend to those who are worthy of the relationship. I realized a couple of Christmases ago that you'd already bypassed me to become the family matriarch, making sure events happen with all the necessary ingredients, while the rest of us stumble around mouthing exhortations about what we would have done if we'd just had the time, the money, or if you had simply reminded us.

Being a mother yourself, I know you now understand what you mean to me. I can't imagine my life without you, and Miles and Georgia would tell you the same if they just had the words. We are talking one big deal, reciprocal, co-dependent relationship here.

And so, one heart supports new hearts, life goes on, and the family endures in spite of itself.

Certified

I just renewed my teaching certificate for the eighth time, which means I've had nine certificates, with this newest one being good through 2016, for a total of 45 years of teaching certification. In the state of Georgia, you must be certified in order to teach in all public schools and most of the private ones. A certificate is good for five years and, at the end of every five years, you have to renew it. The requirements for re-certification usually include evidence of staff development and that you haven’t done anything dastardly to a kid.

But this story isn’t so much about my teaching. It’s about my life. My nine certificates, so far, have spanned 40 years, my entire adult life, and thinking about each one takes me back.

My first certificate arrived in 1971, along with my 21st birthday, my college diploma, and my marriage license. I thought I would teach for a few years until my children came along, and then I would morph into a full-time mom, baking and ironing and donning high heels when hubby came home from work. I remember my mother telling me that I needed to have a college degree in case my husband died and I had to support myself. For that first year after we married, Gary was finishing up Pharmacy School at the University of Georgia and I taught first grade in Barrow County.

In 1976, I renewed my certificate for the first time. By then, Gary and I had moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where we'd had our first born, Melissa, and had then moved back to his home town of Warner Robins, Georgia because his father wasn’t doing well and his mother had just died. We couldn’t sell our house in Greenville, so we lived with Gary’s daddy for about six months. It was during that time that I became pregnant with Billy, which I remember as being a big surprise.  Now, I'm also a little surprised that I bothered to renew my certificate at all,  since what I was intent on at the time was birthing babies and decorating nurseries.  I do remember Gary looking at me in the grocery line one day and saying he didn't know how we were going to make it financially if I didn't go back to teaching.  That's about the time I realized the rules for women had changed from when my mother had given me her college-degree advice, and so I began to re-think my life plan.

My first day teaching after having kids.  Notice the open window.  It was late August with no air conditioning in the schools.

In 1981, during the time of my next renewal, I was teaching full time, I’d just finished my Master’s Degree, and I could tell that something had shifted in me. I was no longer a mother who happened to be a teacher. I was a professional woman who also happened to be a mother. That was also about the time I decided I wanted to go to law school, so I took the LSAT and did quite well, leading me to apply to law school at Mercer University. I was accepted but ultimately decided not to go. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer; I just wanted to have the opportunity to keep on going to school.

 This pretty much sums up my educational philosophy both then and now.

My son, Billy, was in this kindergarten class.

Five years later in 1986, I received my fourth certificate in the midst of working on my Specialist’s Degree and just before my third child’s second birthday. Molly had been a bit of a surprise when she'd arrived, but, although I was certainly happy to have her and loved her just as dearly as I loved the first two, her wonderfulness didn't stop me from my commitment to moving up within my profession.  She probably wouldn't have survived if Barbara, our neighbor, hadn't stepped in to be my much better suited stand-in.  Then, in 1987, I was offered my first out-of-classroom assignment, a job that had me traveling all over the state, training teachers in an early childhood program.  I was pretty full of myself by then and it was wearing on my marriage.

The professional woman juggling work, kids, Molly's blanket, and a cat.

By 1991 when  my fifth certificate arrived in the mail, I was in the midst of a divorce and a doctoral program.  I wasn't traveling as much with my job, but my degree quest had me engaging in a 240 mile round trip to the University of Georgia at least one evening a week.  In 1993, I became an elementary principal, a position I kept for five years.

In 1997, one year after I received my sixth certificate, I finished my Doctorate in Educational Leadership and started my quest to see what my next job would be.  The Dean of Education at Georgia Southwestern State University called and asked if I wanted to join the faculty there.  I did,  and so I left a job paying $80,000 a year for one paying about $52,000.  Although my life as a college professor was much less grueling than my life as a principal, the pay sucked and at some point I realized I'd educated myself into a much lower paying job.

Year 2001 brought an attack on America and my seventh certificate.  I was still at the college and enjoying it, but I worried that my relatively low salary would affect my retirement benefits, so I checked around to see if I could find a job with better pay.  That came with the Department of Education and a move to Atlanta in 2005.  I loved Atlanta but wasn't crazy about the job and what I really wanted was to teach children again before I hung up my professional hat..

By 2006, I had a new job teaching second graders in a wonderful school in Buckhead, which brought renewed meaning to my seventh renewal and my eighth certificate.  I'd come full circle and was back doing what I'd set out to do back in 1971.

So, here I am to now, with my ninth certificate, which came to me the same week as my 61st birthday.  For the first time, it wasn't mailed.  Instead, I had to download it from the Professional Standards Commission website before I could print it.  One of my young teacher friends seemed perplexed as to why I needed to print it at all since it was safely stored on the PSC website.  She didn't know about the other eight, safely kept in a drawer in my living room, evidence of a well-lived (or at least well-intended) life.

I've been contemplating retirement of late, but I'm now thinking I  might stay on a while longer since I still enjoy my job (most days). 

After all, I'm certified for five more years.

How could you not love working with people this size all day?

Why I Can’t Get Any Blogging Done

Today is a school holiday, a free Friday, and while my young teacher friends have taken off to exciting places like New Orleans or the beach, I thought that I could at least get my blog posting done. One I’ve been working on for over a week. This isn’t it.

My current (other) post is about my adult life based on my nine teaching certificates. It’s relatively boring but that won’t stop me from putting it out there as soon as I finish. I did decide that including some photos of me during those times might at least offer some levity. That’s what got in my way today and began my long list of things I’ve done so far that have kept me from finishing that posting. They include:

•  Thinking about the pictures led me to go through my old photo albums on the floor in my hall.
• The floor in my hall reminded me what a mess my house is, which led me, not to cleaning it, but to remembering the stinky wet towels I have in my broken washing machine,
•  Which led to my taking the stinky towels out of my broken washing machine and schlepping them drippingly into my bathroom and washing them in my tub,
• Which led me to taking off my slippers and rolling up my pajama legs and washing my towels the same way people in Italy (and Lucy) make wine
•  Which led me to thinking about my feet and how, if I put on shoes, I could at least take out the trash and then go down into the basement to look for additional family photos I haven’t seen in years,
•  Which led me to deciding to clean out my freezer and refrigerator so that I could gather the old (and I mean really old) food that has been languishing in both and take it down to the garbage cans when I deliver my trash to the recycling bins,
•  Which led me to deciding to gather up all the old pictures from the basement and bring them up and go through them while watching Regis and Kelly on TV,
•  Which led me to noticing a Macy’s coupon left for me on the steps by my friend Susan who lives downstairs,
• Which led me to think about the Old Lady's Macy's, my favorite Macy's, and the fact that I have some birthday money left in my pocket book,
• Which led me out the door and into my car and on my way to North Dekalb Mall.

Note:  I did change out of my pajamas and put on my bra before I left.

Felicity and the Birthday Cheese

I love teaching second graders, at least in part because they are still cute and sweet with their snaggly teeth belying the beauties they will become. They are also quite funny, primarily because they are just making that big step from childish misconceptions to grown-up logical thinking. These little folks are real rule followers,  black-and-white understanders with little interest in or grasp of the nuances of everyday life and personal interactions. It’s this combination of gapped-toothed countenance and developmental stage-stepping that makes them so much fun to teach.

I have quite a few funny second-grade stories but I’m going to relate just a few here. I’m also changing the names to protect the truly innocent.

Jackson is one of my all-time favorite kids, a truly unique human who will use his great intelligence and quirky ways one day to show the world a thing or two.  One afternoon the year I taught him, I’d stayed late to help a mother who was hosting her son’s birthday party on our school playground. Most of the partiers were little boys in my class and when I arrived on the field, they were busy playing a faux football game that primarily consisted of tripping and knocking each other down. I quickly decided that the best thing I could do to help the mom who was busy putting the hotdog picnic together was to keep the kids from killing each other. So I intervened in typical teacher fashion, reminding them of the rules of the playground. At that point, Jackson ran up, looked me straight in the eye and said with perfect deadpan delivery, “This was a whole lot funner before you got here.”

Another great Jackson story happened some time toward the end of that same year.  I was having my students do some basic research using an old-fashioned but still important source of information, that being the good old encyclopedia. I'd counseled them to choose a topic before going to the stack of Britannica Jrs I'd imported from the school library. In fact, I’d told them to come to my desk to run their topic by me before choosing a book to use. Most of the kids were somewhat patiently standing in line, waiting to tell me their topic, but Jackson, being the bottom-line guy he is, was nosing around the A volume, which, of course, was the first book in the set. When I realized he’d skipped a step, I called out to him and told him that I wanted him to have a topic in mind and not just to pick the first thing he came to. He assured me he’d thought hard and had made a good decision and wasn’t just choosing the first thing he saw. A few minutes later when I asked what his topic was, he informed me, with absolute seriousness and commitment to the task at hand, that “aardvark” was what he'd decided to research.

I also have a couple Samantha stories. Samantha, who was in Jackson's class, is bright and creative and already her own person. She’s also quite mature and outspoken, intent on figuring things out and then articulating her thoughts to us all.

One morning near Valentine’s Day, our sharing time somehow turned to how the kids’ parents had met. Some had encountered each other in college, others on blind dates, a couple while traveling in Europe. Samantha told us her parents had met at AA.

A while later, we were talking about the Trail of Tears and what a sad time that was in American history.  I was trying to get the kids involved by asking them how they would've felt if they’d had to pack up and leave home and walk such a long distance. I asked, “What if, while you were walking, your mother got sick and wasn’t able to go on and your father had to carry her?” Samantha responded with, “Well, my parents are divorced so I don’t think my father would carry my mother. Plus, she’s a lesbian.”

During yet another sharing session, one of my boys was telling about the trip his family had recently taken to Florida.  Martha, definitely a developing thinker, then asked the boy, "When you were in Florida, did you see a woman named Helen?" When he said no, she added, "Well, if you go again and if you see someone named Helen, that's my grandmother."

Just a couple of weeks ago, Mrs. Fleckner, one of my colleagues, came into my classroom to tell me something. Her classroom is just a couple of doors down from mine, but because of our schedules, my students don’t see her very often. Mrs. Fleckner is also quite pregnant, and I could tell by the kids' faces and open mouths that they were surprised to see her in this particular state.   So, just after she left the room, I said, “Yes, Mrs. Fleckner is going to have a baby.”   After a moment's silence, one of my sweet angels asked, “Does she know it?”

Which brings me to Felicity and the birthday cheese. My birthday is this coming up this next week and the kids all seem to know, although I swear I didn’t tell them. Anyway, during our break times, there’s been a good bit of whispering and picture drawing from the girls (but not the boys who lean more toward building tall block towers and then knocking them down). Last Tuesday, Felicity, who is a gorgeous and very quiet little girl came up to me during break and wanted to ask me some questions about my favorite things. It went something like this:

 What's your favorite color?

Green

What's your favorite breakfast?

Muffins (I was trying to give her answers she could relate to)

Dinner?

Spaghetti

Dessert?

Cupcakes

I could tell this wasn't going quite the way she wanted, so she started narrowing down her questions, which, by the way, is a good research strategy,  and one that I'm sure Jackson used when he was learning all about aardvarks.

What's your favorite cheese?

Cheddar

What's your favorite sucker?

What are those suckers with the bubble gum in the middle?  I like those.

Blow Pops

Yes, Blow Pops are my favorite sucker.

The next morning, before school, Felicity stopped to ask me if I also like orange cheese.  I didn't mention that I thought cheddar was orange.  I just said yes.

At break that day, when I returned to my desk, I found a piece of drawing paper with "I love you Dr. Mayo" on it.  Under it was a slice of cellophane-wrapped orange cheese and a cherry Blow Pop.  That piece of cheese just might go down in my personal history as one of my all-time favorite birthday gifts ever.

One last story.  This one is about Frank and it will lead me to my ending.  I was watching Frank the other day while I was teaching math.  Frank appeared to be in great agony as if my boring lesson was causing him real physical pain.  He started out by laying his head back on his desk after turning  around so he could at least pretend to look at the board.  Once his head was on his desk, he let it sort of loll there, kind of rolling around like a big old marble.  As I was busy helping my students understand the differences between centimeters and inches, I thought to myself:  Frank is getting ready to roll his head right off his desk and fall out of his chair.  One minute later, there he went, landing on the floor in an embarrassing heap and then jumping back up, pretending, like a cat, that he'd meant to do it.

All of the above serves not only to help me remember what a great and entertaining job I have.  It also reminds me that elementary school teaching is the only profession, other than bartending, where people fall out of their seats on a daily basis.

My Name is Marcia and I’m an Internet Addict

The other morning I got up at my usual time of 4:15 and shuffled to my computer, ready to greet the day. It was dark and cold and dank and a little bit creepy, but that didn’t matter because I had my internet, my world that never sleeps.  Facebook, email, gmail, my newspapers, my favorite blogs. All was well.

That’s until I got that uh-oh feeling. There was a rather nasty message on my screen, something about "can’t find website, please try again.” Oh God, it couldn’t possibly be true. My internet couldn’t possibly be down. After all, I’m a good person.

I sat for a few seconds in disbelief and then I restarted my computer, praying the good old off-on application would do the trick. When that didn’t work, I started plugging and unplugging cables and looking at the little blinking lights on the receiver thingy. I went from Firefox to Explorer, hoping one of them would be at fault. They weren’t. Next, I turned on the TV to see if my cable was working.  It was. For a while, I just sat sadly at the computer, pushing my mouse and fingering the keys, pretending to surf the net, similar to the way little boys pretend to drive while sitting in their daddies’ inert cars. I thought to call my son, Billy, on the west coast because he can usually talk me through these things, but thought better of that stupid idea as it was just after midnight there.

I decided to go ahead and get my bath, hoping to calm myself and find comfort with warm water and a supine position. But alas, calm and comfort were not what descended upon me. As I lay there naked in my tub, I worried about my kids who, although they were all sound asleep, might wake up and post something on Facebook and when I didn’t comment might think I was dead or worse, that I hadn’t paid my cable bill. And in thinking about my cable bill, I began to worry about my bank account, which, because I couldn’t check my balance, might have been infiltrated by someone who stole my identity (after shutting down my internet) and I’d end up in debtors' prison or pushing a grocery cart down Ponce de Leon Avenue and having to use the public library to get online. And then there was the weather. How would I know what to wear to work if I couldn’t check the weather on weather.com. Just looking and sticking my arm out the window certainly wasn’t going to do the trick.  OMG!  It might be somebody's birthday!  How was I to know without Facebook?

Come to think if it, we might have had the end of the world while I was sleeping.  That's probably what caused my internet to be out.  The fact that my cable was working was no indicator because the station my television was set on was HGTV and I doubt if they have anyone on staff in charge of Armageddon, not like I'm sure The Huffington Post has.

I finally pulled my saturated self out of the suds and despondently dragged my wet body back to my forlorn computer, thinking maybe I could at least write something on a Word document, perhaps a sad poem.

Hello World! My internet was back up, right there on my computer where it was supposed to be, proving I really am a good person.

No Eye Deer

I don’t think I know one single woman who can tell a joke. Most men can’t tell them either but they don’t seem to realize it. In my earlier days, I remember standing mute, drink in hand, while some fool monopolized the conversation with a long drawn out story beginning with “Did you hear the one about…?” That doesn’t seem to happen to me any more, but I don’t think it’s because men have stopped telling jokes.  Instead, it seems to be based on a confluence of two things: one, I no longer frequent cocktail parties, and two, I no longer hang out with all that many men.

To me, the funniest stories are the true ones about real people doing stupid things, especially when I know the people doing the stupid things. For example, I love the story about my friend, Cindy, who, when she saw an errant shopping cart heading down the street toward her car, she honked at it. Or the one my ex tells about visiting a small-town doctor’s office as a pharmaceutical rep and sitting for quite a while in the waiting room, being eyed by the patients as they all viewed Jerry Springer via their peripheral vision on the mounted TV in the corner. That was until one of the patients asked the other patient sitting next to him on the naugahyde couch, “Hey Myrtle, didn’t this used to be a doctor’s office before we moved in here?”

I also like the stories where I’m the one doing the stupid things. For example, there was the time my daughter, Melissa, who was about eight, talked me into taking her to the only movie Rick Springfield ever made. As we were walking down the aisle of the theater, I spotted the cute little blond who was our dental hygienist. Since I was a busy multi-tasking mom with little time to spare, I dragged poor Melissa down to the cute little blond dental hygienist and then stuck my fingers into poor Melissa’s mouth so I could show the hygienist the weird things Melissa’s teeth were doing. It turned out the cute blond dental hygienist was, instead, the cute blond lifeguard at our neighborhood pool, a girl who knew nothing about teeth and wasn’t all that interested in looking in my daughter's mouth. She was, instead, quite interested in backing up as I came honed in on her, dragging my slobbering child teeth first with my soggy fingers.

Back to jokes, which I generally don't like and can't remember.  I do, however, recall a few jokes and they are all dirty.  The first joke I remember was from Junior High.  I won't relate the joke itself as it's enough to know that the main character was someone named Johnny F^*kerfaster.

Then there's the joke my father-in-law told me just after I married  his son.  My father-in-law was a small-town doctor, esteemed, no, I should say beloved, by all who knew him.  So it would have to be said that he was a stand up guy in all ways, but that didn't stop him from telling me this joke about the female Hell's Angel who was being interviewed by a newscaster.  The joke goes like this:

Newscaster: Have you ever been picked up by the fuzz?

Hell's Angel woman:  No, but I've been thrown around by the tits a few times.

And then there's this one about when Tarzan first met Jane.

Tarzan:  What name?

Jane: Name Jane

Tarzan:  What whole name?

Jane:  Hole name Pussy.

And here's my last joke.  No, don't walk away to refill your glass.  This one is really good.

What do you call a blind deer?  No eye deer.

What do you call a paralyzed blind deer?  Still no eye deer.

What do you call a paralyzed blind deer with no sexual organs?  Still no f^*king eye deer.

Get it?