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maeve66Still Mrs. Weingartner, but in fifth grade I almost better remember the one teacher I left Sarah Weingartner's class for, who taught Science, Mrs. Kantnor. Irene Kantnor. I loved her. She was old too, whiter gray hair, also styled very short, and wiry. Her science class was mostly biology, and I was fascinated. What I remember best was that we dissected live eggs from an incubator, one a week, to see fetal chicken development. I can barely believe we did that then. I can't imagine schools allowing it now. But in 1975, I thought it was incredibly cool, and felt like a real scientist, as well as a real artist, drawing the now aborted fledglings in their fetal development, from tiny bodies that seemed mostly eyes, head and backbone, to things that were recognizably featherless chicks. At the end, there were still a dozen or so chicks that were allowed to hatch, which was cool too.
What else do I remember? There was a field trip to see The Wiz, and that was very cool. The school finally insisted often enough to my mother that I needed an optometrist appointment that I got one, after spending a year walking up to the chalkboard to within an inch or two to write down math problems. So I got glasses, at last, and was amazed to find that trees' leaves were DISTINCT, not a massy blur of green.
By fifth grade we had graded readers, with comprehension questions (ah, the famous comprehension questions), and I worked my way through the 5th grade one in a few weeks. And then the sixth grade one. And then the seventh grade one, and the eighth grade one, and BIZARRELY (it was bizarre that these even existed; why would there be high school level GRADED READERS? Shouldn't high schoolers have been reading novels? Maybe these were for the remedial high school classes? Maybe they just existed somewhere in some District 65/202 warehouse, and were fetched out for me...) the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade ones. I have no memory of actually reading a single thing in any of these books. Just completing the workbooks that went with them. I'd be fired if that's how I taught a class. Here, have a book and a workbook. Come back when you're done. I guess it gave the teacher time to teach other kids or something.
What else do I remember? There was a field trip to see The Wiz, and that was very cool. The school finally insisted often enough to my mother that I needed an optometrist appointment that I got one, after spending a year walking up to the chalkboard to within an inch or two to write down math problems. So I got glasses, at last, and was amazed to find that trees' leaves were DISTINCT, not a massy blur of green.
By fifth grade we had graded readers, with comprehension questions (ah, the famous comprehension questions), and I worked my way through the 5th grade one in a few weeks. And then the sixth grade one. And then the seventh grade one, and the eighth grade one, and BIZARRELY (it was bizarre that these even existed; why would there be high school level GRADED READERS? Shouldn't high schoolers have been reading novels? Maybe these were for the remedial high school classes? Maybe they just existed somewhere in some District 65/202 warehouse, and were fetched out for me...) the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade ones. I have no memory of actually reading a single thing in any of these books. Just completing the workbooks that went with them. I'd be fired if that's how I taught a class. Here, have a book and a workbook. Come back when you're done. I guess it gave the teacher time to teach other kids or something.