Day 3--Write about teachers...

Today's post is about teachers you had growing up, and why you did or did not like them.  To start with, I'll brief you on some favorites.

My absolute favorite teacher was my 2nd grade teacher, Miss Young.  She loved hippopotumuses (hippopotumii?) and hippos always make me think of her.  One of the things I liked in her class was that she had a box of pictures that we used as story starters.  You were supposed to pick a picture and write a story to go with it.  I think I wrote more stories that year than anyone else in the class.  I loved the story starter pictures.  In fact, every so often I see an interesting picture and think "I should write a story about that!"

In High School, one of my favorite teachers was Mr. Reed, who taught math.  Mr. Reed also had a flower shop that he owned, which the students called "Mr. Reed's Weeds".  I think one of the reasons I liked him was that I like math in general, and so it was a favorite class.  He might have even taught me a couple of years in a row, if I remember correctly.

In College my favorite professors tended to be my religion professors. There are 3 I specifically remember, although only two whose names I specifically remember!  I liked S. Michael Wilcox (took Pearl of Great Price from him, loved the lessons I learned in that class) and Stephen Robinson (not sure of the class I took from him, but I remember his "Parable of the Bicycle" pointing to the Atonement of Christ touching me deeply).  The 3rd I can't remember  his name, I want to say Russell somebody, and I took a few different classes from him because I liked him so much.  I just remember him being funny and intertesting.

In thinking back on all these teachers, I find I don't necessarily have what feel like any super interesting "I loved my teacher because..." stories.  I guess mainly it would be that I enjoyed their class and what and how they taught, and I felt like they liked me as well.

As for a teacher I didn't really like, there's really only one that I remember not liking much when I had her.  She really probably was a good teacher (I say that because it was my french teacher, and I do remember enough french to think she must have been pretty ok), but I remember feeling like she made us do things that I didn't enjoy, and she wasn't fun and happy, but rather was grumpy and strict.

Because I feel bad about how grumpy I was about her as a teen, I will not tell you her real name.  I will tell you that we all called her "Madame Moonboots" because she would wear moonboots in the winter with her dresses (she and Napoleon Dynamite must have shopped at the same store).  She had short black hair and her eyebrows were arched so that somehow it seemed to make her look angry all the time. She used to ride her bicycle to work, and I remember one time watching the Wizard of Oz where I saw Dorothy's grumpy bike riding neighbor and thinking "It's Madame Moonboots!"

Mme Moonboots

I used to draw pictures of her for my friends.  I'm a bit out of practice, but they looked something like this:

As I said before, she probably was actually a pretty decent teacher overall (Merci Mme Moonboots!), but at the time I certainly didn't appreciate her.