While reading another blog, I saw that some people actually fit in several prompts in their post.  I tried it yesterday and had great fun, so here goes today’s prompt with FIVE prompts.  See if you can find them.

I am a teacher, yet I struggled a little in school.  I didn’t fail or drop out or anything, I just didn’t do as well as I could have. I was a solid “C+/B-” kind of kid. My parent’s were a little responsible I guess, although now that I am a parent I feel a little guilty pointing fingers, but they are the ones who shuffled me around.  I went to eight different schools over my school career. I always felt like I was “catching up.” But I think the biggest part of my educational demise was  that I was a dreamer, and being a dreamy, distracted kid did not fit with the ideology of education in the sixties.

My last last years were spent at a beautiful school on the edge the woods nestled at the base of the Chugach Mountains.  From there I watched the seasons pass, mountains turned orange, then dusted with white and then spring once again salvaged the trees, little bright green buds appeared, tiny little promises of summer leaves.  My eyes were fixed to that window and my notebooks are full of sketches of what I saw.

Besides being a day-dreamer, I was pretty social, and once I made friends, the next obstacle to my high school success was that I would talk.  And talk.  And talk.  We would beg for library passes and go there and talk.  We would whisper, pass notes, it was magnetic, I couldn’t stop.  I was happy and chatty. A favorite teacher told me that while she “loved my bubbly personality, I should pay more attention.”  (DISCLAIMER: This did NOT make me popular though.  I was a student in the 70’s.  I didn’t know if I wanted to be a hippy or a disco queen, it was a terrible choice, you couldn’t be both, and yet… somehow I tried… I think I fit most neatly into the ski culture there- but my lord- that is a whole OTHER blog post!!)

And while I talked and I dreamed.  There WERE classes I loved though.  They were generally English or History, and it was totally dependent on the teacher.  If the teacher read poetry?  I was hooked.  Required reading?  Loved it, in spite of how my friends bitched about it.  Science?  Math? Not-so-much.

I look back at my unrequited high school education and wish I had paid more attention.  Talked less.  Cared less about my damn friends, few, if any that I keep in contact with besides a Christmas Card.  Paying attention would certainly have made those college years easier – LOL.  Especially at college, salvaging required bits and pieces of knowledge to build on and help me pass College Statistics was a challenge, but I did it.

Talked less.  I will give you that, but the dreaminess?  I wouldn’t change that.  I know that kid, I see myself in a million kids that way.

Prompt words: Dreamer, responsible, ideology, unrequited, salvage.  Did you see them?