My life is full of little snippets of things that happen over time that amaze me. I often save them to share with someone, but I am finding, more and more, that no one is as interested in my stories as I am. Thus, I will share some of them here in hopes of relieving my brain of its clutter, just to make room for more!
1. Type A personality. We all know people who are busy all of the time, and by "busy", I mean a mind that never shuts down. My housekeeper is one of those. She is in her 60s--just a little slip of a thing. She might weigh 95 pounds after a heavy meal, but what a dynamo she is! She comes twice a month, has my whole house clean in two hours, then finds other things to do that I haven't asked her to do. Not surprisingly, she doesn't sleep well at night, and I know why: her brain never turns off!
My house has a driveway that is one-car wide and two-cars long. When Debbie comes to work, she parks behind my buggy in the drive and has to walk past it to get to the front door. When she came on Wednesday, the first thing out of her mouth when she came in the house was, "I don't think your car is locked. The buttons look up."
I was flabbergasted! How many people, including you, do you know who would notice something like that? I chuckled at her. I mean, she was right. I had somehow forgotten to lock the car after a minor grocery shopping trip the day before, but I was amused that it would even pique her attention. What I told her was, "Now I know why you don't sleep at night!" If one focuses on every single little detail of life, the stress has to be enormous!
2. Loving Artie. Artie was my father-in-law for 13 years. He was Old School Cool. When he passed in 1994, in his 80s--the same year as my Dad--I missed him almost as much as I missed my own father.
Artie didn't have a lot of book-learning; he was a semi-rural home-spun Hoosier man, but he was hard working and honest. He was a man of integrity. He had gained a reputation to that effect in the Greencastle-Fillmore, IN, area. He and his wife were an interesting team...and "cute" from the standards of young people looking at older ones. And I loved that man.
When I married their son, Artie was the first (and only) one to thank me for being a good stepmother to their son's children. We were there for a visit. Artie and I were walking up a hill alone on their property when he thanked me for making it "easy" for he and Helen (his wife) to be with their grandchildren. I remembered it because I worked really hard to keep things normal for the kids even though their father and mother were divorced. My own husband never even paid lip service to that. It felt good for my efforts to be recognized, even though I wasn't looking for recognition.
Another time when we were there visiting, he came out from the back room to announce that he and Helen needed to go to town. (They almost never left if we were there.) His excuse? "We are out of 'cundrums' "! They were in their 70s...
Yet another time, there was a stray cat that came around. The house had a big cement patio just outside of the family room's sliding glass doors. Helen complained that everyone else seemed to be able to pet the cat, but it would run from her. When we were there, the cat came around. Helen went out to try to pet it while the rest of us watched through the sliding glass from inside. Helen sat in a lawn chair. The cat approached. Helen reached out to pet it, but the cat started to walk away. Not to be denied, Helen reached out, grabbed the cat by the tail, and yanked it back to her. Needless to say, the cat didn't stick around! From the inside of the glass door, Artie mumbled under his breath, "Well, there's your problem, dumbass." I laughed harder than I should have!
But the thing that endeared me the most to Artie McNary was my mother's funeral. My mom died unexpectedly. She had been in the hospital for a mild stroke but had done so well in a month's rehab that they were ready to send her home in a couple of days. I need to explain that my husband and I had been at odds for the entire month for a lot of reasons that should never have been. I considered my family to be in crisis; he considered it an inconvenience. In any case, on the day after Thanksgiving in 1986, my mother took an unexplained turn for the worse and was going to be sent to ICU. My husband had left to visit his parents with his two eldest children. (I refused to let our daughter go with him.) I called to alert him that Mom was in trouble around 10:30 PM. My next call to his parent's house was around midnight. When I asked for my husband, Helen told me that he had left for IL after my first call, leaving his folks to take the other two kids home to northern IN. All I could say was, "He's too late. Mom died."
I won't go into the details of the next couple of days. I was totally numb and don't remember a lot of it, but I DO remember turning away from Mom's casket at the end of her graveside service to see Artie approaching me with tears streaming down his face to give me a loving hug. He and Helen drove the four hours from Greencastle, IN, to Streator, IL, to attend the funeral of a woman they didn't know, just for me. They refused to stay for the bereavement dinner. They only came to support ME. I will never, ever, forget that moment. We all remained faithful to each other even after my divorce from their son, until the inevitable end when they passed.
3. Lethargic Students. Last night, I was reading some posts on Reddit from teachers who were complaining about how so many of their students are failing classes right now. This in the Corona Virus school year of some classes online and some in person. Most of the teachers were bemoaning the idea that most of the "average" students lacked the motivation to do better--especially those who were doing online learning.
I am reminded of my days in Monrovia, many years after my beginning years of teaching when things were more like the years when I was raised. In those days, if you got in trouble or didn't make the grade, "good enough" wasn't good enough. Things have changed.
I was an elementary school media specialist for 11 years after moving to the suburbs of Chicago from downstate Illinois. Then we moved again, this time to Indiana, and I transitioned back into the classroom in order to be employed. The very first time I gave a unit test to my students, I was shocked at how many kids failed it. I thought I had used the wrong key, but no. That continued all through my tenure in that district. I began to figure that **I** was the problem. I began to dumb things down. I allowed kids to use their notes on tests. I gave major bonus points that had nothing to do with English. I spent the day before each test telling the students what would be on it. I finally allowed open books on tests. I made sure that my tests only covered the important points of a unit, not tiny details. The Honors classes did much better than the regular ones, but even those weren't terrific. Finally, I began to grade the tests "on the curve" (which in itself is an exercise in mathematical expertise and frustration). The only test I would not grade on the curve was the semester final...and for those, I started using questions from the unit tests, having already told the students to save their tests to be used on the final. Honestly, beyond that, I didn't know what else I could do to improve the grades. What the kids didn't know (or care about) was that their failures were my failures. I began to consider myself a bad teacher. If the students couldn't pass a test of what I had taught for weeks at a time, I had to be doing something wrong. If they weren't grasping the main concepts, was it me or them?
Eleven years after retirement, I read those posts on Reddit and realized that the problem rested with them. I know, I know...easy to deflect...but I've come to understand that passing was good enough for them. If they could get by with minimal effort, that's what they'd do. They had no use for English unless it particularly interested them, when they had sport competitions and sports practices to attend and jobs in order to support their vehicles, vehicle insurance, and boyfriends/girlfriends to support. Plus homework? Yeah...right.
Education in the 2020 pandemic is fraught even more with lack of encouragement. Suddenly, parents who can barely get by, themselves, are put in the position of being homeschool monitors. Kids are disheartened because they don't have social encouragement/competition to get them motivated. I am so very glad that I retired before all of this happened. What a sad situation we are in!
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