Teacher/Nurse Appreciation Days

[howeird]

lisa_marli re-posted on FB a graphic purporting to show a teacher doing school work on hs own time, and a diatribe caption about how teachers do that. And she commented that she used to help grade his class' work because he taught accounting, and she is good at accounting. I will tease her here instead of there and mention that my father once taught Werner von Braun's undergrad classes as a TA, and graded those class papers, but I never learned any astrophysics or orbital/celestial mechanics. But that's just a tease because by the time I was old enough to learn that stuff, he was an engineer and all his work was top secret, so even if he wanted to he couldn't teach it to me. And he didn't want to.

But it got to thinking about my grade school teachers. I am going to try to remember them and say a smidge about each one.

Kindergarten: Name??? Blonde, young, was insulted that I could recite the alphabet before she taught it to us.
1st Grade: Miss Moshey. She had taught German to US soldiers during WWII. Her favorite phrase was "mach schnell, bitte". She was horribly strict for a 1st grade teacher, but eminently fair. Here is an example:


2nd Grade: No idea.
3rd Grade: Another blonde. She tried to reason with me that the baby Mom was pregnant with might not be a girl. I was certain it would be. My sister was born two weeks after school ended for the Summer, and I had to wait for months to nyah nyah nyah the teacher.
4th Grade: no idea
5th Grade: Mr. Costa. Science teacher at heart, he had the best field trips, and supported my science fair entry. His tests were easy for me, I kept getting 110% (there was always a bonus q). He also change my life for the worse by assigning me to a different 6th grade class from all the others just because I hit a bully with a rock while we were filing back to class from recess.
6th Grade: Mr. Egger. Total jerk. Did not deserve to be teaching. When I corrected him in class for his WRONG definition of vapor, by reading it out of the big dictionary, he took my report card, slapped an overlay strip and made all my grades D or worse. My parents complained to the principal, and he did not get re-hired the next year. Irony, he went to a high school elsewhere in the district, where he taught science. The next time I saw him was in 8th grade, he was judging the science fair. :-(

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It was also Nurse Appreciation day/week/eon. My appreciation for nurses started in college when I shared a house with a bunch of fellow folkdancers, and one of them was dating a nursing student who was living in a houseful of nursing students, and I dated one of them and hung out with all of them. They all had stories about how a nurse had saved their lives, and inspired them to become nurses.

I have never been sick or wounded enough for nurses to have done that for me, but I saw them in action when my folks were in hospice care at a nursing home. There were two kinds of nurses - the basic RN, who saw his/her job as helping and old person live; and the hospice nurse, who saw his/her job as helping the old person die. Mom's hospice nurse was a total drag. Mom and Dad both had two or three basic RNs who were wonderful.