My Favorite Teacher

INGRID THOFT

Pencils and notebooks and binders.  That's what I recently stumbled upon in the "seasonal" aisle of my local Target.  Is it really back-to-school season already?  I imagine it can't come soon enough for some parents, but it was a walk down memory lane for me rather than a not-too-distant goal!  I thought about my school days:  dissecting a fetal pig in science class; pieces of pizza that resembled floor tiles; field hockey drills wearing pinnies; and my favorite teacher.

Her name is Mrs. Harder, and I don't think that it's a coincidence that my favorite teacher was my English teacher.  Kind, thoughtful, and energetic, Mrs. Harder was the highlight of my academic day, and she will always be bonded in my mind with Edith Wharton and Shakespeare.  She fed my love of reading, and she taught how to write, which has clearly served me well.  More than that, in her classroom there were always lively discussions about bigger, more complex issues, which suggested she thought we were up for the challenge of beginning to tackle the adult world.  She taught us about values and integrity and the power we all have to choose the kind of people we want to be.  Grammar, punctuation, imagery, and ethics:  It was all on the agenda in Mrs. Harder's classroom.

These days, she insists I call her Joanne, which I still can't quite get used to, and she's one of my most enthusiastic and loyal fans.  She attends my Boston-area events, and last fall, invited me back to speak to the student body at my alma mater.  I feel enormously grateful that she was my teacher all those years ago, but I'm also thrilled that these days she's my friend.

How about you, Reds?  Who was your favorite teacher?  Were you in touch after your school days?

LUCY BURDETTE: Ingrid, you are so lucky to have your favorite teacher morph to fan and friend! Probably like the rest of you, I adored school and going back to school. I think my fave was Mrs. Covey in fifth grade. She was warm and interesting and made school fun. The details are fuzzy, and here's a story that tells more about me than her. Report cards came out and I had nothing but A's. Except for one B, which must have been given by the gym teacher. But my best friend Lynn had an A in gym. I went sobbing to Mrs. Covey, and she changed it to an A:). 

In high school, we had the most wonderful drama and choral music teachers, Mr. Schneider and Mr. Dorhout. I had very modest (almost minimal) talent in both of those subjects, but I was in love with the community they built and the seriousness with which they taught us and their great good humor and dedication. I still remember the alto harmonies from the choral pieces we sang...such a gift!

HALLIE EPHRON: My favorite teacher was in sixth grade, Barbara Ann Schenkel at El Rodeo school in Beverly Hills. She was lively, interesting, and she encouraged me to think for myself and say what I thought. Maybe it was because of her that I decided to go to Barnard College (she was an alum) and become a teacher. Sadly, by the time I tried to reach out to her (I'd moved to the East coast, was teaching education courses at the college level, had started a family...) it was too late. She'd died of breast cancer.

So my advice to everyone about your favorite teachers, if you want to reach out and tell them so, don't wait.

JENN MCKINLAY: I did not love school. In fact, if it weren't for my English teacher, Mr. Taylor, my science teacher, Mr. Meehan, and my favorite teacher, Mrs. Bodwell, I probably would have cut school a heck of a lot more than I did. Mrs. B was the choir teacher at East Lyme High School in CT, and I was lucky enough to be in choir, select choir, and her specially chosen group of eight for a small ensemble choir, where we were invited to perform as backup singers for a Broadway recording and in a gospel church in New London to name just a few of Mrs. B's field trips. Pretty much any cool gig she could throw us into, she did, and it was awesome. She was an amazingly talented woman who performed as a soprano in operas at the Met, but what I remember most about her was that she always wore four inch heels (she was on the small side of petite), kept her blonde hair in a neat bob, and had the biggest grin when she was conducting us from the podium. The woman was a live wire, and it was contagious!

We recently reconnected through social media. She's retired and living in Vermont, while I am in AZ. She still sings, I do not, but we both have a passion for knitting. We've been sharing our knitting adventures, and it's like rediscovering our friendship all over again. During my turbulent teen years, she was definitely one of the few teachers who saw past my tough exterior to the creativity inside of me, looking for an outlet. She taught me to be poised and confident, to pursue my passion wholeheartedly, and to push through failure and try, try, and try again until I got it right. I owe her so very much.

RHYS BOWEN: Like Jenn I did not adore school! I was very smart, always at the top of my class, but I was at an all girls school, and most of my teachers were close to retirement age--mean-spirited old spinsters who loved to criticize and inflict punishments. In sewing class, the teacher would walk around with a ruler and if our hands moved to the wrong position beside the sewing machine THWACK came the ruler over our knuckles!  I did like my music teacher and was also in the choir. We had a lovely young history teacher, but she got married and left. Great weeping and wailing. I didn't particularly like my sixth form English teacher, Miss Willis, but she helped to make me the writer I am. She challenged. She also mocked, I'm afraid, but she set creative assignments and a friend and I took those challenges, which resulted in my winning the English prize, editing the school magazine and being invited to tea with Arnot Robertson, a famous novelist, when she visited the school.

Oh, but college was a different matter.  I had some wonderful professors, especially for my thesis. She never taught. She would throw out seemingly unrelated questions, and then suddenly light would dawn, and we'd see the connection and go "Oh!". She wanted me to stay on and do my PhD, but I got lured away by the BBC. 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Have you ever heard of a high school where the English teacher created a club, called The Hastings Club, and encouraged all his students to wear black armbands on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings to mourn the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans? I am thrilled to have a chance to once again honor the name of the fabulous Thomas Thornburg. I was just at my high school's 50th reunion, as you know, and every single person there mentioned how much Mr. Thornburg had changed their life. (He probably would have mentioned that my pronouns do not agree in the previous sentence.)

He was hilarious, and, hoping he doesn't read this, so incredibly cute, and brilliant--and I mean brilliant. He let us all love Shakespeare and Spenser and F Scott Fitzgerald and writing and poetry and the power of our own language and imagination. 

He was incredibly tough grading papers. He had a rubber stamp with the word GUG on it, which he would stamp on our papers when something was so indescribably terrible that he couldn't even manage to explain why it was so terrible.

I would not be where I am today (wherever that is) without him, and I have to say that so many people at the reunion said just the same thing.
The good news is he lives in Montana, and his wife and I are Facebook friends, and how cool is that? (I still imagine him looking just like this photo. And that's me and good pal Susan Palmer in the Hastings Club yearbook photo.)
I have used his name as a character in several of my books, just in honor of him...the books would not exist without him, you know?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: School was not a great experience for me once I hit middle-school, although I did have a very good and encouraging English teacher in tenth grade. But in elementary school, my best friend and I had the same teacher in third and sixth grade, Miss Schwann. I can't imagine what either of us would be like today without her. She was a wonderful teacher, kind and demanding and funny. She always let you know she had expectations, and you had better live up to them. She loved reading, and the half hour when she would read aloud to us was the high point at the end of every day. In sixth grade, she read us A WRINKLE IN TIME, and it was such an experience it has stuck with me ever since. I was a good reader before her classes, and a great (and addicted) reader after.

Here's the "Wrinkle" cover from my youth.  It cost $1.25!  

Tell us readers, who were your favorite teachers?  Do you stay in touch with them?

Wrinkles in Time and Space

DEB: Jetlag

Such a simple word, and one we toss off so casually. According to my very respected source (Dictionary.com) the term was coined between 1965 and 1970, and means "a temporary disruption of the body's normal biological rhythms after high-speed air travel through several time zones."

HA!

"Temporary disruption" my . . . Well, you know what I mean. I'm just back in Texas after fifteen days in London, and finding it as difficult as ever to slip back into the current of normal (glamorous, as Julia has revealed) life. It's not just trying to eat and sleep on the right schedule, it's trying to remember where the spoons live in this suddenly strange kitchen, being shocked not to find the BBC on the telly, wondering what it is that we usually eat on Friday nights . . . (And what IS that disgusting stuff in fridge?)

How could I possibly have been driving through Hyde Park in a taxi, gazing at the London fruit trees bursting into bloom, only a few hours ago?

What we are really talking about when we say "jetlag" is severe temporal, geographical, physical, and emotional displacement.

How do you think Meg Murray felt in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time when she tessered for the first (or second or third) time and wondered how she could be suddenly in one place when she had just been in another? (Queasy, if I remember correctly) L'Engle's novel was published in 1962--interesting when you consider that commercial jet travel had only become a viable reality four years earlier, in October, 1958, when, amid much fanfare, Pan American inaugurated its New York-London route, ushering in a new era in the history of passenger aviation. (This flight stopped over in Iceland. It wasn't until the next year that true intercontinental New York-London routes were opened.) Was L'Engle prescient in the matter of jetlag?

Now, here we are fifty-ish years later. We may not tesser yet, but we fly faster and farther, and I don't think anyone has come up with a better way of adjusting our bodies or our psyches.

I think I could call myself a seasoned international traveler, having, in the last thirty-some-odd years, made more trips between the US and the UK than I can count. (By seasoned, I mean that no matter how much advance warning I have, I end up in a blind panic, packing and repacking my suitcase in the wee hours of the morning before a trip. I invariably take all the wrong things. I forget something essential. I leave my house looking as if it's suffered the passage of a minor hurricane. And then I do the same thing in reverse, except I have to tidy the London flat before I leave, AND find room in my suitcase for the books I didn't mean to buy.)

Every trip I swear the next one will be easier, that I will be a new, organized person, but it never is, and I never am. So I fantasize about the QE2, of having a slow, luxurious in-between time where I can plan and think and accustom myself to the reality of arriving in a different place. And then of course there's the even more seductive fantasy of coming home to a clean house, a perfect desk, meals ready and waiting, and a valet to unpack and put away my clothes . . . (Jeeves, where are you?)

What about you, girls? Are you sophisticated, organized travelers? Have you discovered the secret to the glamorous jet-setting life? And if so, will you SHARE?

HALLIE: Whenever I get ready to travel I think of Rosemary and her box of Cheerios. I always always always pack a bag of trail mix. I'm more worried about going hungry than I am about not having the right clothes.


These days I travel with less and less. Just bought myself a really little (half-size) rolling suitcase and I'm determined to use it through my book tour - starting in under a month! Here comes COME AND FIND ME. Wish I were going to London to flog it and having to return jet lagged.

HANK: Welcome home, Deb! And much applause. I was once the QUEEN of overpackers--you never know when you'll be invited to tea at the castle, or horseback riding, or a red carpet event, right? But once on a trip to the Caribbean, my bulging suitcase was lost by the airlines. I arrived in Nevis with NOTHING. I went to a shop, bought a long black skirt, a tank top, a bathing suit and some flip flops. I wore my husband's shorts and t-shirt. I was FINE. When my stuff finally arrived, it was embarrassing.

Now I, so virtuously, just bring what I can carry on. (My secret? Really? Packing with tissue paper. It takes up NO space, and nothing ever wrinkles. It's astonishing.

ROBERTA: Congrats on your first blog appearance Deb--and welcome home! I have one of those little half suitcases too, Hallie. I feel so virtuous when that's all I bring:). But traveling is stressful--I'm anxious the entire week before a trip. Feeling like I have to have EVERYTHING in order--straightening piles that I haven't looked at in months, arranging for pets and plants and mail...I can begin to see why people decide to just stay home.

And ps, my neighbor, who's very well traveled, insists that the secret to avoiding jet lag is refusing to lie down the first day you arrive. Immediately switch over to the new time zone and avoid all temptation to nap. Easier said than done!

RHYS: Welcome dear Deb. I have become the queen of light packers. We went around the Australian outback for 3 weeks with a 20 inch rollaboard. I find I do well with a couple of pairs of khaki pants, coordinating T shirts, sweater, pashmina for unexpected cold an one broomstick skirt that can be rolled into an old pantyhose. I take a silk scarf in case I have to dress up. However, I always manage to arrive after a long flight looking as if I've just been released from a horrible jail--pale, hollow eyed, unkempt, while those around me look jolly and fresh. And I've never learned the trick with jetlag. I always go straight onto local time, take a sleeping pill the first night, AND still feel like death warmed over. I always feel like a zombie for two days in London (you should hear the BBC interview I gave once the afternoon I arrived!)

I'm waiting for one of those thingies they had in Star Trek, but then they'd probably send half my molecules to India by mistake!


JAN: What your talking about Deb is a Re-entry problem, not jet lag. I have it every time I travel. You've been gone from home (or one of your homes) and while you've been gone, life and responsibilities have continued. And now, where ever you have been has slowed you down or altered the rhythm of your life -- this the worst when you've gone on a sailing vacation or to a an island - and now you have to come back to the INSANE PACE we live at. You just have to declare the first week back a catch up week, and lower your expectations.

As far as packing goes -- every time I pack light I regret it. I still am shallow enough to care more about what I have to wear, than what I have to eat. My husband laughs at me every time. I've decided I'm incorrigible.

ROSEMARY: On adventure trips everything is about comfort for me - and not being cold. On business trips I have no problem wearing the same black pants and just changing tops and jackets. It's those pesky "fun" trips where I seem to think I'm going to wear all the jewelry that I never wear at home...and different scarves..and belts and shoes. And dresses...why do I have so many dresses? I'm going to Paris this weekend and I'm probably not bringing a dress. If you're not going to channel your inner Audrey there, where are you going to do it?


Will go carry on, with black pants, black jacket and a scarf. I ignore wrinkles, and re jet lag there's nothing a Red Bull or 5 hour Energy shot in the right direction can't fix
BTW Hallie, I've upgraded to Heart to Heart - the caviar of cereals!