dona's 365

My fifth grade teacher, Miss Jademan, assigned a prayer for us to memorize. I couldn’t find a copy of it and didn’t know how to find one. I expected to get in trouble, but didn’t, and didn’t understand why, later realizing it must have been because I attended public school .

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Gibboney was nice enough. Once, though, she thought I was cheating on a reading test (I wasn’t) and scolded me. I did a teaching internship in her classroom during college. It was weird hanging out in the teacher’s lounge with my old elementary school teachers.

My two kindergarten teachers, Miss Peterson and Mrs. Freeman, left me with few memories. One of them laughed at my dancing and one of them instructed me to lie down when I had a bloody nose. We napped on mats and had milk and graham crackers for snack. That’s it.

Miss Meyer scared even the parents, but I liked her. Maybe she saw that I was vulnerable, maybe she just liked me. When she decided I needed to repeat third grade, I asked to be in her class again. Genuinely surprised, but pleased said, "most don't want me one year."

High school psychology teacher, Mr. Ishmal, challenged us to define love and showed us a strangely beautiful film of vaginal liquid crystallizing on a microscope slide. But for all his talk of love and sex, he seemed a sort of slimy, creepy character who’d probably never heard of dental floss.

Although Miss Bramer developed polio when it was still a threat in the US it didn’t stop her. Confined to a wheelchair with silver splints on her hands she became a junior high teacher. She led the school newspaper staff. She taught 7th grade English. She taught me to write.

Mrs. Anderson was years ahead of her time. She tossed the basal readers and encouraged us to choose our own books long before the term “Whole Language” was coined. We immersed ourselves in the delicious words of L’Engle, Tolkein, Lewis, and Grahame for the whole of our sixth grade year.

The first person I hated, Mrs. Tidwell said she wanted to be an opera singer instead of the fourth-grade teacher she became. She humiliated me -- my art, my singing, my work . She laughed at my ambition to be a doctor. So I taught; hoping to replace a Mrs. Tidwell.