Feeling Nostalgic

Hello friends!  I am visiting my parents in Ohio.  It's a bittersweet visit as I am helping them pack and move out of my childhood home.  It's a stage in my life that I've been dreading. 

When I got there, my mom had everything that belonged to me in the corner of the basement.  My first job was to go through it all to see what I wanted and throw away the rest.  UGH.

I'm not good at throwing things away and got anxious as I faced the task before me.  The first box I opened was my wedding gown.  Great.  Let's just go straight for the jugular.  Keep or donate?  I have two boys.  It's unlikely anyone will ever want to wear it.  But, it's beautiful and I can't imagine anyone having it but me.  I kept it. 


The next several boxes were all my college "teaching" stuff.  What a trip down memory lane that was.  Most of you whipper-snappers won't even believe me when I tell you that I found a box full of hand-made bulletin board sets.  They were works of art by my-20-something-self.  I had traced, cut out and decorated all the borders and lettering.  I hand drew all the graphics and colored them.  If they weren't so faded and crumbling, I might have used them. Now they are trash.

Back then, cross-curricular themes were all the rage. I found folders of units I had built with handwritten worksheets (with required excellent penmanship) and hand-drawn graphics on purple ditto masters (what are those?).  If you were a good typist (no personal computers existed in the early 1980's), you might be brave enough to type your ditto masters before you ran them on a, now-extinct, ditto machine (there were no copy machines, either).  When you passed out freshly run dittos, the students all smelled them because the chemical had a uniquely pleasant scent to it.  I wonder how many brain cells were fried by ditto chemicals?

One thing I did love about my college prep program is how much time we spent in the classrooms of Columbus, Ohio, practicing what we were learning.  I visited every type of school, every grade level, every socio-economic area, public and private.  As I read all my observations and documentations, the memories came flooding back.  I could feel the excitement I once experienced and remember the anxiety I felt, wondering if I would be worthy of the profession I loved.  

It's funny, for as much as things changes, some things stay the same.  All the things I documented in my observations and journals are situations I still continue to encounter year after year. 

On the other hand, I miss how wonderfully pure teaching was.  Teachers were more keenly aware of developmental theories, which played a bigger part in our lesson planning.  I miss how there was room in the curriculum to explore and extend based upon a class's interests.  It created such excitement and engagement in the classroom.  There was more time for children to be creative in the classroom.  Now, I always feel like I am rushing.     It is so sad that there is no time to do these things in our current environment. The art of supporting a child developmentally is gone. Curriculums are jam-packed with expectations to master its standards because, come h*ll or high water, the test is coming.

I'm a sentimental soul. By the time I finished going through my pile, I was emotionally exhausted.  I never thought I would be one of those people who would refer to the "old days".  Education seems to swing on a pendulum.  Maybe we'll swing back to a little "old ways" someday