Breaking news or, at least, a rather timely scoop . . . .
Connies Restaurant at Fourth and Cedar in Sandpoint will reopen at 6 a.m. sharp tomorrow (Tuesday, May 1) morning. Go there and get a Square . . . .
Yesterday, I included a note about my friend and fellow journalist Mindy Cameron who's running for re-election to the Lake Pend Oreille District 84 School Board. She lives out there past Sagle, so she represents that district. I think just the people in her zone get to vote for whoever they want in the position on May 15.
Mindy has served one term on the Board, and local education has moved along at a nice pace since she got involved as a retiree with lifelong interest in education. She and husband Bill Berg helped found the Panhandle Alliance for Education, which I learned just last week, has put together a million dollars for local teacher grants in its short existence of just a few years.
That's pretty impressive, especially for this area where it seems like forever that the word "depressed" didn't just refer to people's moods during ugly weather time. Seems like there was rarely money for much of anything extra during most of the time I taught. If you wanted something extra for your classroom, you organized a bake sale or a raffle. So, it's wonderful for teachers these days to know they've got some passionate guardian angels willing to find the funds to help them enrich their classroom offerings.
Now, I didn't plan to just talk about Mindy today. When I was thinking of her quest for re-election, I got to reminiscing about some of the School Board members I knew during my 33-year tenure as a local teacher----Venus Verhei, Jim Feuling, Ralph Sletager, Ann Souza, Ford Elsaesser, Debbie Ferguson, Marian Ebbett, and Pat Venishnick. Others served, but those are stand-outs on my wall of school board fame.
Venus served a long, long time and rankled more educators than I'd care to count while keeping the constituency happy. Seems like a very well-meaning Venus always instructed people to vote NO when it came to schools. He thought the money could be better spent somewhere else. Voters often followed Venus' advice.
The classic, somewhat anachronistic Venus comment that I'll never forget came one day while he was touring the high school in the '70s, saw those built-in lockers and wondered outloud where the students kept their rubbers. That one got repeated a time or two. Of course, those pure of mind knew that Venus really meant galoshes.
Debbie Ferguson served several terms, at least one with Pat Venishnick. I don't know who was more emotional---Debbie or me---the day we dedicated the auditorium at Sandpoint High School to Pat, who devoted so much of her later life to schools and their students. She served as the perennial accompanist for scores of music students performing solos at spring contests in Coeur d'Alene. Therefore, it seemed appropriate that the cultural gathering place at the high school should bear Pat's name.
Both Pat and Ann Souza liked to visit classrooms---unannounced. I must say that this always intimidated me when they'd suddenly appear and take a seat with the students. I never did get over the insecurities of feeling like someone was "watching me, much like the deer do." It was always a relief when they left, and the students would ask, "Who was that?" I guess they must have thought things were going okay cuz I kept getting hired back.
One of the more memorable visits from Pat came one day shortly before spring vacation. This time she brought along Bob Leonard, our superintendent.
To properly convey my discomfort, I must explain the minutes directly preceding Pat's appearance. It was paragraph-instruction time for my sophomores honors students. The research unit following spring break would include several topics dealing with the Roman Empire, to be researched and boiled down into various types of paragraphs----descriptive, chronological, spatial, persuasive, etc.
To prepare the students, I had put together a paragraph-writing overview of about ten pages. It included explanations and examples dealing with topic sentences, proof statements, transitions, etc. I handed the packets to the students, and, as a joke, simply sat down at my desk and said, "Read it and learn it." They looked at me with blank stares and wondered out loud if I was going to teach them anything.
"No, I'm floatin' into spring vacation, so you can learn it yourself," I quipped, sitting back in my chair as if I were going to take a nap. They pressed me further, to which I again said, "C'mon, get busy. Read it and learn it all. We'll talk about it after spring break."
So, they dutifully began reading. After a minute or so, I broke the silence and said, "Well, okay, I could go over it a bit." On this day, the kids weren't letting me off easily. Playing along, they insisted they could learn it themselves and told me to just sit back and relax.
So, I obliged and got busy with something at my desk. About ten minutes later, I heard some movement, looked up and saw nearly 30 paper airplanes launched from the hands of my learned sophomores. A few hit me head on, while several crash-landed on the floor around my desk.
The classroom door opened. In walked Pat Venishnick and Bob Leonard.
That moment marks one of the few in my life where I was rendered speechless and definitely powerless to explain what was going on in my classroom. I don't know what feeble explanation I tried to give, but my students weren't helping the situation.
Pat and Bob told me to just continue on with what I was doing. Well, sitting at my desk while my students read their paragraph packet didn't exactly provide the shining light of my teaching expertise, but that's precisely what I had been doing when they walked in.
Their visit lasted about three minutes but felt like three days. Finally, they left with impish smiles on their faces, thank God. Fortunate for me, they had sensed that this day before spring break wasn't exactly the time to decide a person's professional future.
That was definitely a day where my own joke turned on me BIG TIME. The rest of the hour was spent with students practicing paragraphs of persuasion/explanation to the superintendent. Then, a few students helped me construct a giant paper airplane container for the letters, addressed to the superintendent and to Pat.
Though it wasn't delivered to the district office exactly by airmail, the package did fall on Bob Leonard's desk by that afternoon and by my hand. Fortunately, the hour involved some learning for the students, a big lesson for me, and a lot of fun for all involved.
I don't know if Mindy's ever encountered such a bizarre scene in local classrooms during her School trustee tenure, but I'm sure she's as aware as anyone that a sense of humor in education is definitely a must, even for school board members.
No comments:
Post a Comment