My Portfolio

This has really been a difficult one to come up with in my memory banks! When I was in eighth grade--the grade that I have taught every year of my teaching career--I wonder what the outcome would have been if my ability to read well hadn't been taken from me! This...

I never attended  Public school.  I attended three different Parochial schools. My first seven years was at St. Charles in Waltham, Mssachusetts.  Eighth grade was at St.Joseph's as my family had moved to the other side of Waltham. For the ninth grade and two months of the tenth grade I attended...

We were a blue collar family through and through. From my great grandfather who was a logger in Nova Scotia to my Grandfather and then my father, who both farmed to live

Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Unlike almost everyone I know, I didn’t encounter any inspirational teachers during my school years. As a Presbyterian, I was sent to Catholic schools from the age of 3 ½ when I became a monthly boarder at Star of the Sea in...

She said, "You were the good reader, weren''t you!"

I was a shy and somewhat serious kid, the kind most people don't recall being in their classes because we were all but invisible.  I would rather have died than speak up or call attention to myself in any way.  In the fourth grade, all that changed.   Until that year, my teachers...

So many teachers have affected my life and directed me toward my destiny.  Who was my favorite teacher--the one that impacted my life the most then, as well as now?  Could it have been my second grade teacher, Mrs. Pulsipher, who used apricot pits as manipulatives to help me learn to...

I liked school and adjusted easily.  It was a no-nonsense “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic” curriculum.   Reading came easy to me and writing was no particular problem. I don’t remember my first attempts at arithmetic but it was probably a miserable experience.  Dealing with numbers was my Waterloo from First Grade all...

In my Freshman year I took Latin.  Teaching Latin to teenagers in Southeastern Kansas in the 1940’s had to be one of the most challenging jobs in Christendom.  The Roman Empire was farther from our world than the star Betelgeuse.  The school board, however, decreed that one year of Latin was...

"I always say that grammar school was my highest education but once in the Army I attended   some schooling, I tested out as a 8th grader . It was important that everyone could write well enough to send a   letter   home."