Finishing Up the First One

80s08 Finishing Up the First One

My journal entry of May 13, 1980, says I had my school physical and the doctor said I had high blood pressure. He also said I was an “extremely likely candidate for a double hernia." That was 28 years ago and I had bilateral hernia repair last August. Wish I would have had him do it then.

I am still in my first journal and need to move on to the rest of the 80s. It just means I am leaving out a lot and can come back and write about this stuff another time.

This first journal is full of reflections about my teaching and planning for next year. It ultimately had a tremendous impact on me as a teacher and as a person, I think, too.

I painted four houses that summer along with teaching junior high summer school. We continued to sell nightcrawlers and I took a three-week archeology course at Toolesboro. We camped there and one night there was a severe storm. We were lucky to get through it. We were in our camper and stayed dry but the other tents were torn out of the ground by the high wind.

Angie and Heather will remember that as a hot stormy summer. I am not sure whether they enjoyed the camping and archeology or not. My parents, Don Young, Claudia Streeter and a few others came to visit us during that dig. I found it very enjoyable and hope to do it again sometime. That course allowed me to advance to BA plus 15 on the district’s salary schedule.

That fall I taught a writing course at the minimum-security prison on Saturday mornings. When I read all the stuff I was doing I think I must have been nuts. By fall I was taking care of Ernie Hayes swimming pool, painting the trim on his house. I was still on the Hope Haven Board and on the Session at church.

That fall I did a session on writing across the curriculum at the state social studies conference in Des Moines. It got rave reviews and an article in the Iowa Department of Public Instruction Newsletter. I was thrilled! For several years after that I was quoted several times. The best compliment, though, came a few years later at an English conference when the presenter passed out my article as an excellent example of what can be done with writing across the curriculum.

Oh, yes, I was still teaching adult Sunday school and teaching full time and, believe it or not, driving a school bus from time to time. I drove it for my own field trips and for the district to transport teachers to the AEA Fall Conference in Burlington.

This journal is full of diatribes about issues that I thought were important, prayers about hopes and dreams and ordinary ramblings. It is hard to categorize much of it. I wonder what my children and grandchildren will make of it someday. No doubt, they will think I was a raving lunatic. Odds are I will be long gone by then so I guess it doesn’t matter.
You are nothing if not a story. It’s up to you how good that story is.