#teachers – Sittin' Ugly Sistahs

The Healing Power of Marvin Gaye

Posted on May 2, 2025May 2, 2025 by Nancy Malcolm

In the 1970’s, education experts decided we needed to insert a values curriculum into our daily course work. Through the years there were various curriculum packages, but one I remember was called, “Values Clarification.”

Within the school day, usually homeroom period, teachers would use certain guided lessons to help students broach tough topics or situations, and moral dilemmas. We were encouraged to help students get to know each other on a more personal level, building relationships and creating community.

The year was 1982, and I was teaching high school Home Economics. My classes were filled half with students wanting to learn to cook and hoping to sample what was made, and the other half were football players needing an ‘easy’ credit.

It was the beginning of the semester, and as part of my Values Clarification curriculum, I had asked the students, one at a time, to stand beside their desk, introduce themselves, and tell one special thing about themselves that nobody else knew.

“My name is Alicia, and I can say the alphabet backwards. Z, W, X, V, U, T…..” And the class politely clapped.

“I’m D’Madre, and I can bench press one hundred pounds.” And he flexed his muscles while attempting to pick up an empty desk and push it into the air.

“Whoa, D’Madre,” I said. “We believe you!”

“My name is Celeste, and I can speak English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Mi ombre es Celeste. Meu nome e’ Celeste.” And everyone applauded.

As we neared the end of the class period I said, “We have time for one more. Bobby, will you make your introduction and tell us something special about yourself?”

Bobby Smith stood up. He was tall, with an athletic build and dark brown eyes. He had the kind of personality that attracted friends like an ant to a picnic sandwich.

“My name is Bobby Smith, and I know all the words to the song, ‘Sexual Healing,” by Marvin Gaye. Do you want me to sing it?”

And before I could take a breath, the class erupted into cheers. He started to dance and hold his ink pen like a microphone.

“Oh baby, let’s get down tonight.”

“Oooh baby, I’m hot just like an oven. I need some lovin.”

“Bobby!” I said. “I think…..”

“Oh Miss, let him finish! We l o v e this song!” And two girls jumped up to chime in as backup singers, “wake up, wake up, wake up…”

“Class! Stop! This is really …”

“I can’t hold it much longer….It’s getting stronger…”

And just when the class broke into the chorus, “And when I get that feeling…I want sexual healing.”

The bell rang.

The class filed out of the doorway, and I motioned for Bobby to stay back.

“Bobby, I think that song was inappropriate for the classroom, don’t you?”

“Ah, Miss, I understand. I won’t do it again, but you have to admit, everyone liked it.” And he gave me a winning smile as he left the room.

I did have to admit, to myself, that it was original, but I silently prayed no one went home saying, “Guess what we learned in Home Economics today?” And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who silently played that song over and over in my mind for the rest of the day.

#Confessions, #Teaching

A Teacher’s Lunch

Posted on March 31, 2025 by Nancy Malcolm

I have been retired from education for almost fifteen years, yet there are many things about teaching school that seem like it was yesterday. One such sensory memory is walking into the school, early before the students arrive, and smelling a combination of floor wax, chalk dust and those delicious, fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth, stick-to-your-hips yeast rolls baking in the cafeteria kitchen. Balm for the soul.

The last two years I taught kindergarten; our lunch was scheduled for 10:20 a.m. Imagine going through that cafeteria line smelling some semblance of tacos or pressed chicken patty on a day-old bun. In reality, I had been smelling this aroma since 7:15 a.m. when I arrived at school. The cafeteria staff was already busy at work prepping for a sumptuous day of school breakfast and lunch.

In late August when school began, the children would not be hungry at 10:20 and would often leave half of what their mothers packed or what was on their lunch tray. By September 15^th, we were all hungry by 10:20 a.m. and then practically starving when snack time rolled around mid-afternoon. Somehow, we all adjusted.

In 1978, I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, and teaching middle schoolers on Fort Hood, Texas. Everyday I packed the same lunch. Everyday I ate the same things: tuna salad, cup o’noodles soup (aka sodium explosion), and a naval orange. Oh, and I drank a TAB. No variations. It was the ‘70’s, what can I say? The combination of lead from the canned tuna, sodium from the soup, and chemicals from the TAB were what kept me going!

As a side note, this was also the year one of my middle school students brought a set of handcuffs to school and tried to cuff my ankle to his. But that’s a story for another day.

One year, I ate a package of peanut butter crackers and drank a Diet Coke for lunch every day, both from the school vending machine. I’m not proud of it, but it was easy.

The first year I was an administrator at a high school, there were three lunches scheduled to accommodate the nearly 2,500 students. I had lunch duty starting at 11:00 a.m. until 1:55 p.m. In the beginning of the year, I would bring my lunch, but I soon tired of the soggy turkey sandwiches forgotten from the day before. My secretary made it her mission to find us something we could eat from the cafeteria and professed that the pressed chicken patty sandwich was the most nutritious and easiest to digest on the go. So, you guessed it, that year my lunch was chicken patty sandwich and a Diet Coke.

As an educator, your lunch hour is never an hour. It is often 30 minutes with the potential for many interruptions. You learn to eat your sandwich while xeroxing papers. You drink the same cup of coffee or bottle of water for hours. You sometimes gulp down your lunch so fast you don’t even remember what you ate, and often you eat your lunch under the prying and sometimes teary eye of a student.

As a high school teacher, lunch periods were notoriously times for skirmishes, fights, and less-than-ideal behaviors, so the concept of an uninterrupted lunch seemed foreign. Students wanted to come into your classroom on their lunch period, which was your lunch period, and make up work.

At middle school, a teacher’s lunch is never her own. There is always a student who needs extra help or simply needs to talk. There is always lunch duty. There is always a meeting to go to. There is always something else to do besides eat…always.

And elementary teachers? Well, they sometimes run on fumes. Once, when I was teaching kindergarten, my students had just gone to PE, so I was going to eat my lunch in the quietness of the classroom. I had just opened my lunch sack when I looked up to see a little face peeking in the door.

“I fell down,” she said, and promptly took a step inside the door to show her bloody knee.

I opened my arms and said, “Come here, let me look at it,” and she fake hobbled over to my desk.

“I was just about to eat my lunch,” I said, “but I can wait until I find a Band-Aid for you. Did you eat all of your lunch?” I asked.

With tears in her eyes, she nodded yes. “But I sure do like chips,” she said.

I slid my baggie of Lays potato chips over to the edge of my desk and a faint smile appeared on her tear-stained face.

I wiped off her scraped knee and placed a star covered Band-Aid over the hurt. Tiny fingers inched open the baggie of chips while I got her a cup of water. I sighed a little as I glanced up to the clock on the wall telling me my thirty minutes was just about up. “Maybe I can eat my sandwich on the way home this afternoon,” I thought, and just before the bell rang, my little student looked straight up into my eyes and said, “I love you, teacher.”

“I love you, too.” I said.

Friendship

Playing School by Ginger Keller Gannaway

Posted on February 23, 2025 by gingerkellergannaway

This story is based on my memories of sharing my wisdom with my younger sisters in the 1960s.

When I was seven years old I tried my hand at what would become my future profession. On a late summer afternoon, I smoothed the front of a stiff red and white church dress, brought my tanned bare feet together, repositioned my white plastic headband, and looked my class over from the white brick fireplace hearth that raised me three inches above those I’d be instructing. Kelly, age three, wearing light blue shorts and a sleeveless white cotton crop top sat crosslegged on the living room carpet. She held a Big Chief tablet and a red crayon. Gayle, age five, wore a faded Tweety bird t-shirt with a never-worn navy school uniform skirt and sat erect on a small wooden chair. She tapped her brand new letter-practicing book with a fat pencil and wriggled her toes as she stretched her feet to touch the legs of a red and yellow plastic chalk board that came with my surprise birthday gift that year: a Suzy Smart Deluxe Doll Set!

Suzy Smart, dressed in a white blouse under a red plaid jumper and standing two feet tall, completed the class and sat stiffly in her own red and yellow plastic desk. I smiled down at my class of three and held up a piece of chalk to draw a large capital letter “A” on the chalk board.

“Today we practice our A’s.” I established eye-contact with each student and added, “Y’all gotta draw ten A’s for me. On your mark, get set… go!”

Gayle took to the assignment like a Cajun to hot boudin. Having to use her lap was all that kept her from making uniform A’s. Kelly tried her first A, but the slanted lines were uneven and her letter did not look like the one on the chalk board.

“I’m gonna make little ‘l’s’,” she said and started covering her first page with a letter she liked.

I focused on the obedient ones. “Good job, Gayle,” I said. Suzy gave me her straight-forward stare. “Nice listening, Suzy.”

Then I knelt down next to Kelly. “Your ‘l’s’ are good, good, but we’re doing ‘A’s.’ Here. Let me show you how.” I put my hand over her fist and guided the red crayon through a perfect A formation. “Like this.”

Kelly pushed aside a stray strand from a pigtail and said, “OK,” and continued to drew more l’s.

“You already made like fifty l’s . You need to learn your A’s.”

“No A’s in my name.”

“Good! You know how to spell your name, but I’m teaching ALL the letters today.”

“ ‘A’ is the very first letter,” said Gayle as she completed her tenth “A” and nodded proudly to each of us, including Suzy. She wrapped a long strand of jet black hair behind right her ear and waited for further instructions.

“How many letters?” asked Kelly.

Getting a bit of teacher inspiration, I said, “We should sing the A-B-C song!”

The human students stood up to belt out “A,B,C,D,E,F,G…” Susie listened. As Kelly screamed out the final Z, she grabbed Gayle’s hands, and led her in circles for the “Now I know my ABC’s” part.

The dancing pupils added impromptu hip-shaking for their song’s end.

I was losing control of my class. I erased the “A” and drew a “B” on the chalk board. “Good job, y’all! Now let’s practice the second letter – B.” My sisters then snapped to like tiny soldiers and for some weird reason saluted.

“Ok, class. Sit down now,” I said. Both obeyed, but first Kelly snatched Gayle’s new pencil gave her the red crayon.

“Hey. Give it back,” said Gayle.

“Just let me borrow it.”

“You suppose to ask.”

“Can I use your pencil?”

“Please.”

“Pleeeease.”

“Say pretty please.”

“Pretty please, ya dumb sneeze.”

“She called me ‘dumb,’ Teacher!”

Kelly stuck her tongue out at the snitch. I clapped my hands together. “Class! Y’all gotta listen.” Gayle grabbed her pencil back and bounced the crayon off Kelly’s pert pug nose.

Kelly picked up Gayle’s letter practice book and ran behind me. “I’m agonna rip this up,” she said.

Gayle could not wait for help from an inept teacher. She knocked over both Susie’s and her desk as she rushed after Kelly.

I tried keeping the girls apart as Kelly danced behind me and moved the book in circles around her face.

“Na! Na! Na! You can’t get me,” she chanted right before Gayle got ahold of her right pigtail. The letter book fell, the chalk board collapsed, and Kelly sprang into fight mode. Both girls got fistfuls of hair. For several seconds the hair-pulling tug-of-war was a stalemate. Gayle’s longer arms gave her an advantage, but Kelly’s spicy temper made it a fair fight.

“Stop it! Y’all are wrong, wrong! Stop!” I said as I pushed my way between them.
Kelly was biting her stuck-out tongue to concentrate. Gayle had both of her sister’s pigtails when Kelly dropped her sister’s hair strands. Her smaller stature lacked the force she needed to make Gayle release the pigtails, so Kelly leaned back and kicked her left foot high enough to get her foe right in her tee-heinie. The taller girl let go of the shorter one’s hair and fell to the carpet. She put both hands over the place of pain and let loose the “OWWWWW’s”

“That’s what you get,” said Kelly.

Gayle moaned like a dying opossum.

I sat on Gayle’s chair in defeat. Kelly tapped a line of dots on the fallen chalkboard as her sister made herself into a ball on the floor. I straightened the bow on the Suzy doll’s ponytail and sighed as if I’d dropped the last bite of the last slice of watermelon into a pile of fire ants.

Being used to sister fights and being relieved that I was above this current argument, I went to the den’s plaid couch and looked out our huge picture window. Our dog Lady was taking her mid-morning nap in the shade of our cement patio. I focused past our yard on the rice fields that surrounded our home. The sun winked at me between oak tree branches. With a sigh that reflected on and accepted my big sister wisdom, I decided that teaching was not for me.

Family, Relationships

Mirror Images by Ginger Keller Gannaway

Posted on February 14, 2016August 15, 2021 by gingerkellergannaway

Pride filled me with warmth on a cold early morn when I viewed the selfie that my 22-year-old “baby” sent me before he left for his student teaching gig in 2016. My laid back lad who wore faded t-shirts and tattered sneakers was not hung up on details like good clothes. In the selfie, however, he wore new brown slacks with a matching belt and a wrinkle-free, cream-colored button down shirt. His girlfriend had given him a slick haircut, and only she and I knew his glasses were held together with Super Glue. He also had the echo of a smile, and my usually laid-back, monk-like Art Major child appeared eager and excited to go to school.

And so the teacher tradition in our family lived on. I retired after 36 years in public school classrooms. On that chilly morning I looked at Evan’s handsome, hopeful face and remembered owning the latter adjective long ago and far away…

In 1962 I got a blond-haired Susie Smart Doll from Santa. She stood two feet tall, wore a plaid skirt with suspenders, and a white collared shirt. She came with a desk and a small chalk board. At 6 a.m. when I sleepily walked into the big living room and saw this dream-come-true doll under the Christmas tree, I was dumbstruck! After I found my voice and ran down the long hall to my parents’ bedroom, I jumped on their bed and in breathless spurts let them in on on the massive surprise: “Momma! Daddy! Santa. Brought. Me. Susie Smart! Can you believe it?!”

So began my fascination with teaching. That year I taught Susie so many things: how to write her ABC’s, simple addition, and the importance of paying close attention to your teacher. My two younger sisters sometimes joined our class as did the occasional stuffed bear. Susie was the model student who always sat quietly and listened attentively.

Oh, how far from reality was my Susie! Real life students rarely sit quietly at attention. I remember a day at Pearce Middle School when a seventh grader literally fell out of his desk without warning. Maybe he was reaching for a pencil on the floor or just rearranging papers on his desk. But with his arms flailing and his legs dancing in the air, he fell to the floor while his adolescent voice squawked, “Whaaa!”

Fifteen years later I told my high school students that middle school was too much for me because “Students can fall out of their desks for no apparent reason!”

The thousands I’ve taught through the years seem to meld together in my memory with a few highs and lows sticking out:

Andy, the 16-year-old seventh grader who was taller than I was and glared at me with pure hate when I took him in the hall outside my classroom to use the paddle that every new teacher was given at a school literally located on the wrong side of the tracks.

Victoria, the feisty 7th grader who helped me break-up a fight in my portable classroom by putting the boy who had hurled a desk at another student in a choke-hold and yelling, “It’s ok, Ms. G., I got him!”

Sid, the senior who pulled out his pecker when I went to his desk to answer a question about his college essay after school one day during a tutoring session.

Nicole, the award-winning actor, comedienne, and journalist who awed me with her literary insight and wrote me a thank you card I treasure more than jewelry.

Tyrone, the anchor for our Eye of the Cougar morning announcements who also painted the backdrop mural in our studio and visited me years later and gave me a flyer for the rap band he started and performed with around town.

Dare and Kyle, the crazy campus duo who once hauled a shopping cart full of “shit we found in our garage” as part of their visualization of hell assignment after we read “Paradise Lost.”

In 2016 I wished Evan all the stamina and flexibility he needed to be a teacher. He already had more creativity and compassion than most people can even dream of possessing. He went from being a substitute art teacher to being the audio/visual production instructor (and assistant tennis coach) at the Austin high school he once attended.

Now in the fall 2021 Evan decorates his classroom, sets up his video technology, and rearranges the lessons, videos, and syllabi he has created for the school year that will follow the pandemic year of chaos and Zoom lessons. His beard is longer and his smile less eager. But he has the bravery to match his creativity. More important, he knows how to connect with his students by using respect and a solid sense of humor. He’s ready for all that the educational powers-that-be will demand of him. Teaching is in his DNA!