Should I have been a teacher? I reflect on my younger days.

This is  President's Day weekend.When I was in school we celebrated each president's day, George Washington on February 22 and Abraham Lincoln on February 12, but we did not stay home from school. We studied the history of these great men's lives. I wonder if teachers still have their students learn about these presidents who were born in February.

I taught elementary school, fourth grade, but I don't think  I made my history classes very interesting. Looking  back on the young 23 year-old I was then, I wish I could tell her what she could do to make those classes interesting.

My nephew, a history buff, teaches history and he knows how to interest all of his students. I have not attended his classes, but I  hear that he doesn't teach from a text book. He uses other methods to get the high school children so involved they love it. They love him.

Someone once said to me, "I'll bet you were a wonderful teacher."

Perhaps I was a good teacher because I took a personal interest in each child that sat in my classroom. I might  have become too close to  my kids because many of them had family problems they wanted to share with me. One little perfectionist, a  good student, had emotional problems because her father and mother separated. The little girl felt a need to take care of her mother who evidently shared her troubles and fears with her children. The child became almost hysterical when she made a mistake on a test. I let  her come into class early for days so she could talk to me about her concerns. She sat in my lap and cried as she told me how she and  her mom knelt by her bed every night and prayed for her father to come back. 

Another troubled student, a boy who was eleven years old, but big for his age, came into school after the school year began. He sat in back of the class with anger shooting from his eyes. His body language told me  he was trouble. He  never opened a book or picked up a pencil. His arms crossed over his  chest, he glared at me.

It was not difficult to see this boy needed counseling. Not knowing anything about his history   it was clear that he was on the verge of exploding, and I hoped it would not happen in my classroom. I wrote a letter to his parents and asked them to come in to see me. I also suggested he might benefit from therapy. 

Soon after his arrival, we were told we would have Parent's Day. Mothers and fathers could come and sit in the back of the classroom, observe the children, and  me. The idea  of having such a critical audience unnerved me, a green, inexperienced young teacher. 

I was never anxious when I stood before my 32 students each day, but having parents there to observe was a different thing. My timing of the  letter home for the troubled boy could  not have been worse. He arrived the morning of Parent's Day with a thunder cloud face and immediately told me he was not going to see a shrink. 

"You can't make me, either," he said in a voice that said  he was itching for a fight. I had hoped his  parents would not tell him I  suggested he have therapy, but  they must have told him I thought he needed a psychiatrist. 

My day with the  parents had begun on a very bad note. I went to my principal, Mrs. Gotko, a slight little woman who had suffered a  bad car accident the year before and had missed several months of school. 

"I'm afraid he will cause a  bad incident while the parents are here. If he rebels and won't mind me, I don't know what I will do, " I said.

"I'll come down and talk to him," Mrs Gotko said.

I went back to my classroom and soon the principal arrived and motioned for my angry student to come out in the hallway. He slammed a book down on his desk and ambled out the door. I felt such relief just knowing my competent principal was going to  handle my problem. I called the roll and had no sooner reached the Ds than one of my students cried out. "Miss Council, Mrs. Gotko is on the floor!" 

I rushed to  the door and found the older woman struggling to her feet. My student was no where to be seen.

"What happened?"

"He knocked me down. He didn't  hit me, but he pushed me." Breathless and upset, Mrs. Gotko said she was going to call his parents. "You can go back to your classroom now."

Several adults came into the room and took their seats in the back. I managed to get through my classes as though nothing had happened, but when lunch time came and the parents had gone I went straight to the office. 

"He won't be back here. You won't have to deal with him anymore." The principal said  she had called the police who were out looking for him. 

"What will they do with him," I asked. I felt guilty that I had not been able to handle the boy and I never wanted him to  leave school under such horrible circumstances. He was so young and already in trouble with the  police. 

I later learned that he was found by the police that afternoon, and that he was going to be sent to his grandmother's to live. 

I wondered why this boy hated the world. Had he been abused at home? Maybe he had a stepfather or father who was mean to him or a mother who mistreated him. A child would not normally have so much anger inside if he had not faced major problems. I wondered if there had been more time, would I have been able to reach him. 

I never heard anything else about this child, but he is just one of the many I still feel concern for, feel I  somehow failed. Looking back, I think I  have too  much empathy to  be a good school teacher. I should have studied psychology. I wanted to help these kids more than I wanted to teach them to read and write. 

What I should  have done

Looking back, I see what I could have done with my early years that might have been more helpful, places where I  could have made more of a difference, work that would have been more suitable to me. Like my sister, Gay, I think I would have liked counseling. Or maybe I could have taught psychology, a subject I most enjoy. Maybe I should have worked for a non-profit that helps children in distress. I might have been a good counselor or children. 

All throughout our lives we learn, gain wisdom in many ways, and when we are too old to start over, we finally discover what we should have done or been.

Have you ever felt you failed at something or failed someone? 

Fluid intelligence and Crystallized intelligence - What does that mean?

As we get older we sometimes feel we are not keeping up with the younger generation and might wonder if we are losing our mental acuity. I am relieved to learn that all of the knowledge and experience I've gained in my life (crystallized intelligence) offsets the difficulty I seem to have lately with new technology. I have patience and I will conquer all the new stuff on my new computer!

I was most happy to read the following article in a newsletter I receive. You might find it interesting as well.

You May Be Older… But You're Wiser Too!

It might take our aging brains longer to process information, but research shows experience more than makes up for it.

You see, there are two types of intelligence that affect our decision-making as we age. The first is fluid intelligence, the ability to learn and process information. The other is crystallized intelligence. This refers to experience and accumulated knowledge.

Previous research shows fluid intelligence declines with aging. However, crystallized intelligence tends to increase with age.

Given these changes, a group of researchers wondered if people become better or worse decision-makers as they grow older. And if older adults make better decisions, how do they make up for their lower levels of fluid intelligence?

To answer this question, researchers at the University of California Riverside recruited a group of 336 people. Just over half the participants were between the ages of 18 and 29. The remaining subjects were in the 60 to 82 age group.

Each of these groups went through a battery of intelligence tests, including vocabulary testing, math questions and general knowledge.

They were also asked a series of questions that measured their ability to understand financial issues – from knowledge of compound interest and credit card debt to understanding gains and losses.

The researchers discovered the older participants performed as well or better than the younger participants in decision-making measures. They also had more patience and a better understanding of debt and finance.

"The findings confirm our hypothesis that experience and acquired knowledge from a lifetime of decision making help offset the declining ability to learn and process new information," co-author Ye Li said.

To compensate for decreased fluid intelligence, Li suggests using tools and aids around you to help. For example, using a calculator or consulting an advisor when making financial decisions can help support the decision-making process, no matter what your age.

http://www.nutri-health.com/Emails/NH_1013_NutriNews_10-3_email.html

Birthdays - what to celebrate?

Me and my tiny birthday cake. It was too pretty to cut, but it  tasted good.
In my hair is the lovely flower used to make leis in Hawaii.

Birthdays are big milestones when we are children. Remember when you were ten years old? How about that wonderful birthday that we thought would change our lives -- sixteen? Drivers License!!
Some can't wait for the day they reach drinking age which used to be 18, but is now 21. During those years we anticipate future birthdays with excitement.


Having celebrated a birthday recently, I faced some facts I'd not looked in the eye before.

1. No matter how much people say, You don't look your age, I don't feel any better about ageing.
2. No matter that the nurse at the dermatologist's office said I had "wisdom" spots on my hands, I know they are due to all those years I baked in the sun at Panama City Beach when I was young.
They have nothing to do with wisdom, but everything to do with age.
3. No matter that I used to celebrate with roses and wine, now my roses are on the tiny cake and my therapist said I need to drink more water.
4. No matter that I had no loving card from my husband this year, I know he still wishes me a happy birthday, and I can read the ones he gave me for all my birthdays in years past, because I kept every one.

Mothers and Babies and Cousins

Since this blog is titled Writing Life Stories, I'll share one with you tonight.

 One of my favorite relatives was my adult cousin Vivian.  I can see her now -- always smiling and telling humorus stories. When she and her mother came up from Florida to visit our family on the farm, my brothers begged them to sing. The mother and daughter sang in perfect harmony old songs and some of the popular songs of the day.

Vivian's mother, Annie, played guitar, her eyes twinklng when she taught us funny songs like the one about the man served tough meat - "He sawed and he sawed, and he couldn't make a mark, He sawed and he sawed and he couldn't make a mark."  We sang for days after our aunt and cousin drove away.

I was about seven years old when Vivian and Aunt Annie came and brought Vivian's new baby girl, Pamela. I could hardly wait to hold her. As soon as Vivian stepped out of her automobile holding the blanket-swaddled infant, I began pleading.
"Can I hold her? Will you let me hold her?"
I had been waiting, not too patiently, since Mother told me the baby was coming to our house. Now I expected my cousin to hand over her precious child to me.

Vivian, a new mother, spoke to me in a firm voice. "No. You can't hold her yet. You're too little." She turned to walk into the house. "You might drop her."
She had no idea how disappointed I was to hear those words. I already loved the baby even though I'd not met her. I could see her tiny fingers curled like pink shells and I wanted to feel them in my hands. Her hair, fine and more delicate than the hair on one of my baby dolls, intrigued my child's desire to run my grubby fingers through it.

But Vivian said no touching. I'm sure I'd have been as protective of my first baby, so I can't blame my cousin. Finally Mother held the new baby, and she let me sit in the chair with her so I could be close to little Pamela. I remember breathing in the  smell of  baby powder and baby lotion - seems it has always been the fragrance connected to little babies.
"See her smile, Honey? She likes you," Mother said, knowing how badly I wanted to hold the bundle of blanket and child, and she didn't brush my hand away when I reached out to timidly touch Pamela's soft arm.
Why do we remember things like this from so many, many years ago? The small child still abides inside me, and I feel those same strong urges to touch and hold that baby. Being denied by my dear cousin, hurt me at the time, but as I grew older, of course, I realized the maternal feelings of a new mother, the fear for her baby, and the possessiveness new mothers have when first holding court with their infant.

My mother, who birthed seven children, knew the ways of a new mother, but she also knew her child had been as anxious to see the new baby as she was to see what Santa left under the tree.
 She made the experience work for both the new mother and for me. Was it a mother's intuition or simply the wisdom and maturity that comes with age?

I'll have dinner with that baby, now a lovely woman, this week. I look forward to giving her a big hug and her mother and mine will be with us in spirit.

The words mother and cousin are words that provoke certain feelings. What do those words bring to mind for you?

Age is a learning experience that can’t be gained in the best college or university. With age comes wisdom and mature thinking. It is not our number of birthdays that make us wise however, it is the hurts, the losses, the tragedies we face and overcome. It is also the celebrations large and small of successes and how we accept them.


With every loss of someone we love, our lives change in some way. For months I’ve had my brother and his wife on my mind. He died suddenly on a Sunday morning in August and she passed away three months later.

How can my life ever be the same? We die a little bit with the death of our loved ones. But we learn something each time we face the pain. Hopefully we learn something that helps us with the time we have left. In talking with my brother’s daughter, I felt the raw edges of her grief. For months that family watched their mother fighting for her life, tortured with surgeries, and finally she passed away quietly under Hospice care.

The  cremains of this couple, married back in the fifties, are commingled in one urn and  buried in an ancient cemetery near the grave of our great-grandfather under massive oaks gray with moss.

Christmas is coming, but how do the daughters and grandchildren celebrate the holidays with joy when the home their tradition-loving mother filled with light, with delicious family meals, exquisite Christmas trees, and gifts lovingly bought or made, is no longer there. It hits them. You can't go home now because home with Mom and Dad is gone. That unconditional love from their parents is only a memory now.

Wisdom comes with this realization. Once we face the pain ourselves, we don’t judge how others handle grief. Once humbled we realize we have no right to judge. We have had our legs cut out from under us and we barely survived, we feel fortunate to still be here, so how could we judge anyone who is dealing with that pain. Empathy grows in places it never thrived before.

Once I was ignorant about this kind of loss. But I learned as I experienced losses of loved ones. Everyone deals with loss, with mourning, in their own way. No one can tell us how we should behave. No rules apply. No limits apply. We don’t get over it. We go on with our lives, and if we are lucky, we finally have days when we no longer feel that stabbing pain when we think of our loved one. We finally are able to talk about our loss without crying, but that doesn’t mean the hurt is gone. We just bury it deeper inside so we can continue to live in the real world.

Finding a way to reach out and help others seems to work best for healing. Starting a ministry for helping children, using our talents to teach others what we know, supporting Hospice or doing something for others in the name of our loved one gives us peace and comfort. Most of us have a need to keep the name of our loved one alive. “As long as we are remembered by even one person we continue to live.”

As my nieces and their children face life without the guiding light of their strong father and mother, my hope is for healing, and my prayers for peace in their lives are foremost on my mind.