a follow up to a friend's blog

So, I read a blog post a friend wrote about our junior high school Spanish teacher, Senora Showalter. Her post reminded me of so many things about that class, but I will just name a few:

1. There was a lone ninth grade boy in my class. I won't name him here. I had just read Gone with the Wind and he looked exactly like Rhett Butler would have to me. He had to put up with all the little seventh grade girls mooning over him. Hilarious.

2. She wore these flowy printed pants that were always a little bit too short. Often they had a white background with some sort of flowers on them. She always paired them with tennis shoes, mostly black. And she usually wore white socks. This is perhaps why I am okay with wearing white shoes with black pants, but not black shoes with white pants.

3. She would grit her teeth together when she was mad, just clicking her teeth together in a very distinctive way...any of you that had her know exactly what I'm talking about.

4. She was always late. I had her for first period and I was so conscious of time back then - I am a little more relaxed now - so I was always worried, but it turned out just fine, because often we were waiting for her.

5. She made Matthew M (can't remember the last name, and even if I could I wouldn't put it here) cry the first week of class. I remember, we were learning the alphabet, and she had one of those big red-orange plastic baseball bats...the kind that are way too fat and if you actually threw something really hard at it, or someone swung excessively, it would develop a big dent in it that never quite would come out.

Anyway, she wanted to make sure that we could say the d/th sound. I had grown up hearing it because my mom went to Spain on a semester abroad once, so I had no problem. Showalter went around the room, a cagey look in her eye, requiring us to say a word with the d/th in the middle. Her glasses hung on a string around her neck, and they would bounce as she took the baseball bat, which she hid behind her back, and bopped poor kids who couldn't say it correctly on the head. Hard.

Poor Matthew, he had a slight speech issue, and saying the word she put to him was very difficult. She hit him two or three times. I was absolutely stricken; I don't think I had ever seen a teacher strike a student before, and I didn't know what to do. I went home and told my mom. I'm not sure she believed me, but apparently enough other kids told their parents that she got a reprimand (deservedly so). Fear is not the best teaching method.

6. Around Christmastime, Showalter decided that she had a voice problem, and needed to have a microphone on her all the time to be heard, not to wear out her voice. Which was fine - after so many years of talking loudly over kids, I would probably have voice issues, too. She would use it sometimes, and not other times, but there didn't seem to be very much consistency for when she would utilize it and when she wouldn't. One time, she went to the bathroom and forgot to take the headset off. Bad idea, in a class full of seventh-and-eighth graders. Eeps.

7. We had an assignment to make a pinata. I made a gold pear, from some poem. It was Mom's idea to do the pear. I was at an absolute loss. It was easy though because all I had to do was use a balloon and paper that, so I was good to go.  I remember I spent hours with a little eraser, cutting the crepe paper in tiny strips, putting the end of the paper on the eraser of a pencil, and then gluing it. In retrospect it would have been so much easier just to roll the yellow paper around and around it but I wasn't sure if that would have passed muster. Plus, manual brainless labor like that is good for the soul every once in awhile. I don't think I got a very good grade on my pinata. Matthew M did show everybody up though by coming with a TIE fighter done in blue and shiny silver and black.

 

Good old Spanish class. Too bad I don't remember much of what I learned. Does that mean I never learned anything?