It's the first day of school in most Texas schools today. Over the weekend my sister-in-law was getting her classroom ready. I suppose a lot of teachers spent their weekends that way. I'm sure that a lot of parents spent their Sunday night getting a lot of things together too. And lets face it, getting an excited 8 year old to bed at a decent time is probably the hardest job of all.
My niece is a high school senior this year and is very excited to be so. I imagine that she will be attending dances every weekend this year. She plays basketball and softball. So, she will also be busy with sports. She has decided to stop running cross country this year although she was good at it and enjoyed it. But it is probably just as well. She is going to have so many other things going on, she wouldn't have had time for all of it anyway. Rebecca is nothing if not a social butterfly.
My youngest nephew is a sophomore. Tim plays football. He is on the JV team, this year at Nacogdoches. He is a strapping young fellow who I am told can eat his weight in chicken fried steak. Not surprising. He is after all a Meyers. The difference between the two of us, however, is that he works his chicken fried steak back off before it has time to settle on his hips. I don't really understand that concept.
The other three nephews have all moved on to college. The oldest has decided to go back and get another degree in sports nutrition. I am excited about this possibility. I'm thinking once Jacob finishes this degree, I'll be a slim trim fighting machine! After all, he is bound to need guinea pigs for this nutrition stuff, right? Who better than an old overweight pre-menopausal woman, right? If he can fix me, he can fix any athlete. His first degree is in some sort of behavioral marketing or some such. Way over my head and apparently over potential employers heads, as well. As I understand it, the behavioral degree will be helpful along with the sports nutrition thing.
Matt is starting his final semester at Texas Tech. He is an engineering major. He only had to get one more class for graduation. So, I'm sending him positive "hope this semester is a breeze" thoughts this morning. He is married to Melissa who graduated from nursing school last spring. So, I think they are ready to get their lives moving away from the college world.
Chris is a sophomore at TCU, they actually started school last week. He posted on FB last week around midnight the night before his first class that he was not ready and still didn't even have a pencil to write with. I cannot tell you how "Christopher" that comment was. Chris is very intelligent, but he doesn't seem to be a big planner. He plays rugby at TCU. I am sure that he had all of his rugby equipment in order, perhaps even clean and folded or shining from a recent polishing if there is any equipment for rugby that requires that. But books and pencils.... not so much.
I remember several first days of school from my childhood. But I remember even better the nights before the first days of school. I remember riding bikes with Kara Compton on Nottingham the evening before school started one year. It was probably 4th grade. We talked endlessly about what we were going to wear to school the next day. I loved going through all of my new school clothes and deciding on just the perfect outfit to wear that first day. By 4th grade I had started getting a lot of store bought clothes. Up until then, most of my clothes were made by either Mom or Grandma. Now I look back and think that the hand sewn clothes were greatness. At the time, I hated it. I didn't want to be different from the other kids.
My 4th grade home room teacher was Mrs. Colston. I kind of hated that. She sipped "Listerine" from the bottle in her cabinet in the classroom all day. She had really bad teeth and as a result when she spoke, she always spat. So, you didn't want to stand too close to her when she was telling you something. She was a woman of some sizable heft. I didn't like being in her class. All of my friends were in Mrs. Mora's class next door to our classroom. They sang songs in class and had a great time. We could hear them. It was like there were rays of sunshine going into Mrs. Mora's classroom and spears of gloom coming into our classroom. Mrs. Mora was a former neighbor of ours when we had lived on Houston St. and I always thought she was so nice. I couldn't wait to be in the 4th grade so she could be my teacher and then when I finally got there, she wasn't my teacher. I had the dreaded Mrs. Colston instead.
A few years later, in the 6th grade, I got the male version of Mrs. Colston. Mr. Lampkin was my math teacher. That was even worse. He also enjoyed his "Listerine" in the classroom. When he called roll everyday he mispronounced my name. I desperately wanted to not answer until he pronounced it correctly, but that would have gotten me in trouble. He always called roll by last name only. If you didn't answer then he would say your entire name. On the first day he said "Meers" and nobody answered. Then he said it again and still nobody answered. I was obviously waiting for him to say Meyers which I was pretty sure would be right after this "Meers" person who refused to answer. Then he said Susan Meers and I realized he was mispronouncing Meyers and so I spoke up and said something like, "Here! But it's Meyers." He then asked how my last name was spelled and I told him. He told me that M-E-Y-E-R-S was pronounced "Meers". I told him that that was not the way we pronounced it and he told me we were wrong. So for the rest of the year every single day he called roll and said "Meers" and looked me directly in the eye when he did it and I said "here" and hated him every single day of 6th grade. Everyday, I would day dream about walking up to him and calling him Mr. "Lump"kin to his face. But I knew that would get me in trouble and so I didn't.
I got a "D" in his class one 6 weeks. I had never gotten a grade like that before. When I took my report card home that day I was sobbing. My parents talked about it and talked to me about it and decided that Mom needed to talk to him. I thought I had done the math problems the way they were supposed to be. I did all of my homework and my parents had gone over it and thought it was right. But then I got the "D". So, Mom went to school and talked to him. She said the smell of "Listerine" on his breath nearly knocked her down when he spoke. I don't know the details, but it turned out that he had given me an incorrect grade when they went through his grade book together. I'm sure it had something to do with the drunken stupor that he was in most of the time. There have been very few people in my life that I have truly hated. Mr. Lampkin was one of them. He is the reason I hate math to this day.
I think one of my my all time favorite teachers was Mrs. Johannson, she was my 7th grade math teacher. I learned so much that year. First of all, I learned all of the stuff that I didn't learn in Mr. Lampkin's class the previous year. Plus, I learned that it was okay to ask a question if you didn't understand something. She was so nice and would find ways to explain it until you understood. Dana Duskin and I were in that class together. I think we kind of wore her out with asking questions, but for the first time in over a year, I actually understood what I was doing in regards to math. It didn't make me like math, but it at least made it tolerable.
I was always an English girl. I LOVED English. My number one all time favorite teacher was Mrs. Brown who was my 11th grade English teacher in Bay City. She introduced me to my love of writing. We had just moved to Bay City that summer and I didn't know many people yet. A few weeks after school started she kept me after class and asked me if I had ever been involved in UIL writing contests. I told her I hadn't and she asked if I wanted to be a part of her UIL team. I thought, what the heck! So, I did. It was so much fun. I love being given a topic and a few facts and then being able to write them in a manner to suit the style whether it be news writing or feature writing. The following year, she asked me to join the yearbook staff and my Senior year I was editor of the yearbook. That was a lot of fun too. My only regret was that in the introduction for the 1981 yearbook which I wrote there was an error that nobody caught. The word "off" should have been used and instead the word "of" appeared. To this day, I am still bothered by that typo.
Oh well! Happy first day of school to all of the kids out there and an even happier first day of school to their parents. I hope it is a great year. But more importantly, I hope that all of my travels this year take me through areas that do not have a school zone.
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