Nonnie left her mark...
Saturday, July 21, 2007
nanho butterfly bush
This was the first bloom on the butterfly bush. It didn't last too long, but it was gorgeous.
butterfly
There was a butterfly in the garden today. It appears to be a monarch butterfly, but it had a broken wing. Part of one wing was missing, and the outside of one wing appeared gray. I'm not sure what that means, or if you can see it in the picture, but I just thought I would share!
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Do I look like one?
This is a short essay I wrote for my class. It was the response to the prompt, I am now a "fill in the blank." Do I look like one? We wrote it after reading another essay starting with the same beginning.
I am now a high school math teacher. Do I look like one? I don’t know, maybe after six years, with the few extra pounds from the pregnancy and a couple more gray hairs peeking through, I do now. How can I judge? When I went to high school, all of my math teachers were men with silver hair and scholarly looks. I certainly don’t look like they did. My students don’t see me as unusual though; almost all of their teachers are young, most of them younger than me at this point. My students don’t even see math as a male-dominated field anymore, not like I did when I was their age. How did the shift happen so quickly? I’m not quite sure.
I know that when I started teaching, at twenty-three, I did not look like a math teacher. If one more person said to me, “You look like a student,” I might have screamed. My second year teaching, I was feeling quite sick and needed an administrator’s approval to go home early, but none could be found. Debbie, who had been my science teacher years earlier, saw me and said, “I’ll find someone to sign you out.” She knocked on the door to the conference room and out came Bob, the new assistant principal I had not yet been introduced to. “Bob, this young lady needs someone to sign her out.”
“Well, she’ll need to see the nurse.” he huffed.
“Bob, Denise is one of our teachers, not a student,” she replied, visibly annoyed at his gruffness and lack of knowledge about the staff. I don’t know who was more embarrassed by the situation, him or me. I felt like an idiot for not making myself somehow look more like a teacher. Is it because I’m not that tall? Is it because I don’t wear skirts or dresses regularly? Maybe it is because I don’t normally wear makeup. Would a shorter hairstyle help? I don’t know.
Even when I was teaching a few months before my maternity leave, a grandparent in a student conference said to his grandson, “She’s your teacher?” At the time I thought, “I’m thirty years old and pregnant, what else do I have to do for people to think I look like a teacher?”
My fear is that I will go right from appearing too young to be a teacher to looking like some kind of old fashioned teacher from the past. Or I will develop some strange eccentricity that I remember many of my teachers having, whether it was drinking too much coffee, having too many cats, or saying “oh dear” too much. Maybe I will be transformed into a strange caricature of myself.
For now, though, when I look in the mirror, I do look like a math teacher to me. I have been teaching for longer than I was a college student, longer than I’ve been married, longer than I’ve been a mom. I don’t know what else to see when I look in the mirror. Maybe that is why I have such trouble with others not seeing the same thing.
I am now a high school math teacher. Do I look like one? I don’t know, maybe after six years, with the few extra pounds from the pregnancy and a couple more gray hairs peeking through, I do now. How can I judge? When I went to high school, all of my math teachers were men with silver hair and scholarly looks. I certainly don’t look like they did. My students don’t see me as unusual though; almost all of their teachers are young, most of them younger than me at this point. My students don’t even see math as a male-dominated field anymore, not like I did when I was their age. How did the shift happen so quickly? I’m not quite sure.
I know that when I started teaching, at twenty-three, I did not look like a math teacher. If one more person said to me, “You look like a student,” I might have screamed. My second year teaching, I was feeling quite sick and needed an administrator’s approval to go home early, but none could be found. Debbie, who had been my science teacher years earlier, saw me and said, “I’ll find someone to sign you out.” She knocked on the door to the conference room and out came Bob, the new assistant principal I had not yet been introduced to. “Bob, this young lady needs someone to sign her out.”
“Well, she’ll need to see the nurse.” he huffed.
“Bob, Denise is one of our teachers, not a student,” she replied, visibly annoyed at his gruffness and lack of knowledge about the staff. I don’t know who was more embarrassed by the situation, him or me. I felt like an idiot for not making myself somehow look more like a teacher. Is it because I’m not that tall? Is it because I don’t wear skirts or dresses regularly? Maybe it is because I don’t normally wear makeup. Would a shorter hairstyle help? I don’t know.
Even when I was teaching a few months before my maternity leave, a grandparent in a student conference said to his grandson, “She’s your teacher?” At the time I thought, “I’m thirty years old and pregnant, what else do I have to do for people to think I look like a teacher?”
My fear is that I will go right from appearing too young to be a teacher to looking like some kind of old fashioned teacher from the past. Or I will develop some strange eccentricity that I remember many of my teachers having, whether it was drinking too much coffee, having too many cats, or saying “oh dear” too much. Maybe I will be transformed into a strange caricature of myself.
For now, though, when I look in the mirror, I do look like a math teacher to me. I have been teaching for longer than I was a college student, longer than I’ve been married, longer than I’ve been a mom. I don’t know what else to see when I look in the mirror. Maybe that is why I have such trouble with others not seeing the same thing.
Personalizing History
As you may or may not have noticed, I haven't been keeping up with the blog as much as I used to. I've been taking a class towards my master's degree at Wesleyan University. I am a math major, but I have to take at least three electives so I chose to take this writing course, Personalizing History. Essentially it is a workshop in memoir writing. Much of what I have written so far is too personal to be displayed on this medium, but I thought I would at least share some of the things I have written that I think are amusing.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Monday, July 2, 2007
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