Unfortunately, although RantWoman has to miss an upcoming high school reunion, she is feeling appallingly sentimental. It's not just the email mentioning a classmate who listened to Jimi Hendrix. RantWoman is not sure she knew in high school who Jimi Hendrix was. Nowadays, RantWoman only occasionally pays attention to the fact that she now lives in Hendrix's home town.
Today for absolutely no reason, RantWoman clicked on an old website and saw pictures and retirement notices from some of her teachers. RantWoman cannot explain why thinking of her teachers is somehow even more of a timewarp than thinking of her classmates. Well, RantWoman could swear they must all have used their own graduation photos on the website because RantWoman remembers that they seemed OLD. Now RantWoman and her classmates are of course at least that OLD, which may in fact be the problem.
Take a look at some retirement shots:
RantWoman's 10th grade English teacher's comments are less remarkable than others: parents, school comes first then extracurricular activities, then a job. This is not what one would expect from someone who talked sometimes about how Bob Dylan was a great poet but a lousy singer. On the other hand this teacher also plays golf and coached a lot of sports teams too.
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/lake/3026/teachers/schwarz3.jpg
RantWoman's 7th grade math teacher set RantWoman to reading Flatland to keep her out of trouble while the rest of the class did their lessons. Enough said.
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/lake/3026/teachers/cormier2.jpg
RantWoman's 8th grade history teacher.
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/lake/3026/teachers/corbett1.jpg
All these images will have to be OCR'd if you need the whole text via screen reader but the quality of the image appear decent to RantWoman. In the article he talks about the impact of the following national changes:
Brown vs Topeka (does he mean Brown vs Bd of Education?)
Tinker vs DesMoines (free speech, dress codes; coincidentally, RantWoman knows the plaintiff or knew her until her very recent untimely death)
the 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18
increased federal funding for education (reference Sputnik and science)
The ADA
The communications revolution.
Okay, so RantWoman had influences!
RantWoman thinks this teacher's mention of the ADA is funny for one odd reason. RantWoman has always had eyesight bad enough to have trouble reading the blackboard from very far back in the room. Once in awhile this would be an issue and RantMom would march in, point out her kid's thick glasses and demand that the young RantWoman be seated near the front of the room. This ensured that RantWoman could see the board but it sometimes completely killed opportunities for passing notes and otherwise having a social life, er slacking off.
This teacher seated students alphabetically and for some reason RantWoman's class was especially large. RantWoman wound up at the back of the room with almost no prayer of seeing the blackboard. RantWoman asked the teacher to be reseated and for some reason he did not do it or he did it and still later moved RantWoman because he needed to keep an eye on someone else. RantWoman got to spend history class in the back of the room, sometimes with novels propped in her history book. RantWoman got to experience a little more of what sometimes goes on in the back of 8th grade classrooms. For better or worse, RantWoman's academic performance did not even suffer enough ever to get RantMom involved!
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