Skip to main content

Ch. 23 Mrs. B: the Messenger of My Downfall

After receiving our grades, the three student teachers and their mentors went out to lunch at a nearby restaurant. It was supposed to be a fun time, but at least for me, the meal was hard to swallow. I nearly broke down in the classroom when Mrs. B gave me the bad news.about my grade. I don't think it would have mattered one scintilla, but Mrs. B ordered me to cut out the tears, and I did it in record time. You didn't  disobey an OCS like Mrs. B. After all, she was now the master of my fate.

Back at college I had a full slate of classes and I walked through them in a haze of depression. I don't know what my parents or friends thought of my demeanor, but no one said anything encouraging. I probably seemed normal to them since depression was my norm. Still, although I pretty much told everyone about my lousy grade, I didn't put two and two together and arrive at a helpful conclusion. I was stubbornly persistent in that if I had made it through all those years of classes, I wasn't going to be cheated at the chance to get a real live teaching job. It didn't help that two of my friends seemed to glide through their student teaching assignments with little or no difficulty. It was hard to think of myself as a second-rater when for most of my academic life I had excelled.

I got my chance to repair some of the damage after I blurted out my story to the teacher of my educational seminar class. She was sympathetic and agreed with me regarding the lousy prospects of getting a job offer. She encouraged me to contact the college supervisor, call her up and convince her to change the grade to a B-minus. That way it would go on my permanent record as a B. To make a long story short, I followed her advice and had my grade changed. I had to grovel, but it wasn't the first time.

I've always been a pragmatist so I congratulated myself for taking swift action and remedying the situation. Almost as a reward, I received a job offer to teach third grade from Woodbridge Schools. So I scrapped my plans to go to upper New York state as a summer camp counselor and stayed in New Jersey to prepare for the Big Day.

Well, the Big Day came and went, and I realized almost immediately that I didn't love this job. And to turn in a great performance you had to love teaching or at least love the kids. More and more I flashed back to Mrs. B and her comments. Just because she had OCS didn 't mean that everything that came out of her mouth didn't apply to me. In fact as two years went by and then three and four years, I gradually concluded that I was not a good fit for teaching. Mrs. B knew it five years before, and I was just accepting it now. No one was chasing me from the profession, and all my supervisory evaluations had been excellent, but I knew that Mrs. B had been on target. So I resigned.

Yeah, Mrs. B had OCS and maybe it was a coincidence that her temperament and personality helped mold me into a so-so teacher, but I had proof now that she had been correct. So the lesson for me was what? Never discount the feedback of an OCS adult. Sometimes, just sometimes, the OCS adult is right.

Next time: My Funniest OCS Adventure

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Never Had a Nickname

They say it's the little things in life that destroy marriages: he doesn't lower the toilet seat; she never listens to his work anecdotes; he eats with his fingers; she never can find her car keys. The same adage applies to self image or self concept. It's the little things that can build or destroy egos. Although my parents had baby names for me that they used at times--for example, "cookie" and "pussycat," these never morphed into appropriate adult nick names. For instance, no one in my house ever called me Jan. That would have been the most common and appropriate nickname for "Janice," but no one ever came up with it. Was it a severe lack of creativity? I don't think so. In hindsight it said more about parenting style than it did about their opinion of me. My parents ran a rather strict household. We laughed but it was either behind the parents' backs or at a time when my father decreed a joke or anecdote was funny. My point is tha...
1 comment
Read more

Bitching is My Life

Yeah, This is another one of my bitch/gripe essays. How can I keep up the challenging pace? It’s not easy but I work at it. I try to find something negative in everything I see and do. And it works for me. Just yesterday in AZ everyone woke up to a blue sky and warm temps, but I quickly dispensed with that happy development. All I had to do was walk out on our fake grass and I was hit with one big negative after the other. Our fake grass seems to have been infected with real grass and the two don’t complement each other. So I bitched about that over breakfast and pretty soon I had my husband outside pulling out the real stuff. Boy was he miserable! But I scored again! Then in the afternoon I went to the supermarket, and sure enough, I found something else to gripe about. It’s an upscale store. I mean it’s got a Starbucks, a salad bar, about a million bottles of French and domestic wine…..and a homeless guy hanging around at one of the exits. That’s disgusting. Maybe most people do...
1 comment
Read more

Should Old Acquaintances Be Forgot?

In the Scottish dialect of the old New Year's Eve song Auld Lang Syne, the composer posits the question: Should old acquaintances be forgot? The short answer to this is "Sometimes." One example will suffice. A "friend" of mine emailed me the other day and although she is not a writer, her words spoke plenty. Her first rebuke was that I don't answer her calls, and this is a claim I cannot deny. But the accusation was caustic, mean-spirited--it was as if I had neglected to visit her in the hospital, that's how grievous my omission was. She insinuated so much by those few harsh words. Why did she call? Purportedly to inform me of her physical status and that of her dog Murph. Being the obedient child I still am, I did call her afterwards, and we spoke. Mostly S spoke of her new illness--osteoarthritis of the spine--and her dog's possible diagnosis of valley fever. I listened and listened and listened until I just couldn't take it any more. The...
2 comments
Read more