| 06/20/09 02:07 AM |
#81
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Donna Thurman
I've just now found the message forum. Funny stuff. Here are my thoughts:
1) Yes, girls, you're right. The showers at Intermediate were humiliating. Lois Youngberg was my neighbor and my mom babysat her kids a lot. She was very nice in real life. But the whole shower thing was unnerving. Her hair was a partial wig.
2) Campus extension was truly educationally bizarre. I'm sure WE were the reason Mr. Black had that nervous tick. When I would see him at Sears working in recent years, there didn't seem to be any tick, and he was very nice. But the friendships on the bus rides to and fro were great.
3) It was indeed 7th grade that we were bused to Intermediate to the 3rd floor. We had Mrs. Hardie for English (I learned two things: the models are can, could, should, would, may, might, must, shall, will... and that a girl should wear a skirt that is short enough to be interesting, yet long enough to cover the subject), Stanley Steamer (last name?), pug nose, for social studies, maybe? and Mr. Newton for math, I believe. I think that's right.
4) Mrs. Gibbons' social studies class - 4th hour,6th grade was where I met my bestest friend... Vicki Embrey. While the rest of you beautiful women were wearing short mini skirts, the two of us had to wear longer skirts so we could be modest... so when she befriended me it was comforting. And despite everyone teasing me and Kent Little about liking each other in that same class as we went to lunch everyday, that was just not true. Kent, isn't that right?
5) Yes, it was Freund/Allen at Benton for our 3rd grade year. My mom brought a baby pig to class and with all the kids surrounding her trying to pet it, Lionel Smiles was in the very back, but had such long arms that he could reach completely through the rest of the kids and pet it. Was that the year we had the turtle races? My turtle won in my class, but by the time we had the BIG race, strawberries had been ripe and my mom had fed him/her a lot of the green tops the day before the race. He just sat there. He wouldn't move.
6) Benton: we loved those monkey bars. We played Partridge Family out there. Kelly Sappington was always Susan Dey, Carrie VanDorn = David Cassidy, and I was Shirley Jones. I chipped my tooth on the slide once. And that Vicki Lawson(?) girl in the 3rd grade jumped out of those swings and compound fractured her arm. Mrs. Speak just turned 100 years old recently.
7) High School teachers: My favorite all time teacher was Mr. Sims. What a gem. Diagramming sentences was wonderful (I'm not kidding). The best thing he did was "prove" that he was psychic. He had us hide a book under an unidentified desk while he went down the hall to wait. Randy Stevens was the one to keep an eye out to make sure Mr. Sims didn't cheat. When he came back he went from desk to desk leaning over, listening for vibes or something... and then very precisely announced which desk we'd hidden it in. We thought he was amazing. Coach Spencer had to teach us about sex in health class... but he was so nervous about it that he could hardly get the job done. He was very young himself. The two things I am most grateful to have learned and that I will use throughout life are: how to sing harmony and how to type!
8) For those of you who say you can't remember things, perhaps it's because you've moved on from high school. For those of us who teach high school, everyday is a reminder. I am forever telling my students... "Well, when I (capital I) was in high school, this is what WE did." I remember many things. Every song brings back some memory of where I was and what I was doing at the time. Benton and NHS are a big part of me. Intermediate is something I try hard to forget. And now I'm envisioning those showers... flashback.
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