A Thank You to Teachers

 

I come from a long line of school teachers. My grandmother, Elsie Benson Storms, taught in a one-room country schoolhouse in Iowa. She continued teaching well into her late 30s, which delayed her marriage to my grandfather.

In the early part of the 1900s teachers signed contracts that required them to abide by the following set of strict rules:

1. You will not marry during the term of your contract. You are not to keep company with men.
2. You must be home between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless attending a school function.
3. You may not loiter downtown in any ice cream stores.
4. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have the permission of the chairman of the board.
5. You may not smoke cigarettes.
6. You may not under any circumstances dye your hair.
7. You may not dress in bright colors.
8. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man unless he is your father or brother.
9. You must wear at least two petticoats.
10. Your dresses must not be any shorter than two inches above the ankle.

While this list seems amusing and amazingly restrictive to our modern day minds, it stemmed from the way society viewed teachers. In that rural landscape, teachers were held in high regard – and expected to be role models for the children.

Like my grandmother, my parents were both school teachers. My dad taught junior high social studies for 30 years, and my mom is now retired after a long career in the field of special education. My sister carries on the family tradition by teaching second grade. I am a college professor, teaching print media.

As a child, I knew my parents worked hard. They would bring home tall stacks of papers to grade in the evenings. I remember helping my dad average end of term grades, and preparing bulletin boards and craft projects for my mom’s class.

Through my family’s example and through the many teachers who have impacted my own life, I have seen that teaching is an honorable profession. It is a job that promises little financial reward and demands great effort, discipline and patience. Teachers must smile every day, whether they are feeling well or not. They have to deal with students who don’t behave, who don’t listen, and who don’t always learn. They are asked to be patient, creative, kind, and faithful.

Teachers grade endless papers, checking for the same mistakes. They review the same curriculum year after year, helping each generation of young people learn the names of the same 50 states and the correct way to construct a paragraph. Although they are now allowed to marry and frequent ice cream shops, they are still expected to be role models for those they teach.

The National Education Association reports that almost 4 million teachers will be needed by the year 2014. And, they estimate, almost half of the new teachers hired will leave the profession in the first five years of teaching due to working conditions and low salaries.

Take time today to thank the teachers you know. Remember also those teachers who have been instrumental in your own life – the ones who gave you words of encouragement or who pointed you toward the profession you do today.

Remember to express your gratitude to your children’s teachers – to those men and women who patiently serve your child on a daily basis.

Donald Quinn once wrote that “If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.”

To the teachers who have changed my own life (Mrs. Hart, Mrs. Grossner, Mrs. Devane, Mrs. McElry, Mr. Pitts, Mrs. Jankowski, Mr. Gansauer, Dr. De Rosset, Dr. James, to name just a few...) thank you for the many ways you have made a difference in my life.

Plain Dress: Women, Clothing and Personal Identity

I've been reading a great deal about women and clothing lately. First, I picked up the book Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work by Deborah Tannen. Years earlier, I had read Tannen's book You Just Don't Understand: Men, Women and Conversation and found the differences between the ways men and women communicate fascinating.

In this later book, she shifts the discussion to gender differences in the workplace.

She discusses the idea that women are always "marked" in the workplace by their clothing choices. In other words, there is no standard style to which women can conform - other than to adop the men's style. For some women, wearing a grey, navy, or black business suit allows them to fit in with the men at their office. They crop their hair or pull it back into a bun. They look: "professional."

Other women wrestle each day with clothing choices. Is my skirt too short? Is my outfit too "sexy" or "dowdy" or "trendy" or "professional"? Even how we style and cut our hair says something about us. It always feels like we are making a statement by how we look.

Tannen describes how, at a recent business conference, she noticed all the men from her office were dressed alike. They all had variations of the same outfit - dark pants, light colored shirt, tie, brown or black shoes. They even had basically the same haircut. By conforming to expectation, they are "unmarked."

Then, she looked at her female colleagues. One looked overtly sexy with tossled hair and high heels. The second looked somewhat matronly with comfort shoes and slacks. The third, a decided feminist had limited makeup and chose earthy fabrics. Each, by her style, was making a distinctive statement about who she was. She was "marked."

Oh the pressure!

In a Christian workplace, the choice is even more bewildering - with added moral pressure. Not only are we to look professional - but godly - the Proverbs 31 woman at the office. We are to look feminine, but not too sexual. Many women, I've noticed, solve this by adopting a more masculine, asexual style. They wear short, cropped hair, dark colors, and conservative clothing choices.

A biography of early Christian workers shows that, to be taken seriously, many of them began to wear the Plain style of the Quakers or Friends. They work dark, simple, floor length dresses. They wore plain dark bonnets. They avoided any frills or fashionable detials. They wanted to be "unmarked" in a sense - but were actually "marking" themselves as set apart from other women - more serious about God and life.

 

For Amanda Berry Smith (pictured above) - this choice of the Plain style was intentional - I wanted to be a "consistent, downright, outright Christian," she wrote. Many women in Amish and Quaker orders continue this style today - although it makes them distinctively "marked" when they leave their unique and isolated communities.

 

How are women to dress? Should we care about our clothing? Should we try to be "unmarked" in the office? What do our outward choices of style say about our inward character and identity? Heavy questions.

 

I don't think I could ever be a Quaker. I love shopping and clothing and style too much. But, right or wrong, I have learned to adapt (somewhat) to my surroundings, to set aside frills when I want to be taken seriously.

 

I remember one day, when I slipped a bit and wore a leopard-printed skirt to a mainly male-attended business meeting. As I took notes using a pink pen, one of my male colleagues said to me, "What are you doing? Legally Blonde?"

 

I'm not blonde - not even close - but I had let my feminine self surface in the midst of the sea of navy blue business suits. Most of the time, I keep it in check.

 

What do your style choices say about you?

 

 

Movie Night: All That Heaven Allows 1955

Sigh...All that Heaven Allows is the kind of movie that makes you want to curl up on the sofa on a rainy day. Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman star in this 1955 love story in technicolor glory. She is a lonely widow surrounded by country club friends and their groping husbands. He is a hunky gardener, who is caring for the trees surrounding her suburban home.

I heard about this movie in a book called Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger. In his lovely novel about love and loss, the main character has a favorite movie that shapes her life. You've got it: All that Heaven Allows. She talks about the movie so much, that I determined to find a copy and watch it for myself. I did not realize that this movie was the inspiration for one of my modern-day favorites Far From Heaven - which was filmed and directed to reflect the style of this genre with its rich, saturated colors and sweeping melodrama.

Jane Wyman is a lovely, classy actress - and here she plays a misunderstood widow who is trying to decide what she wants out of life.

Her husband's death has caused everybody, including the nosy neighbors, to voice their opinion about her actions and her future.

Into this scene walks Rock Hudson in all of his handsome splendidness. He is the strong silent type who hangs out with beatniks and drinks Chianti out of straw-wrapped bottles. He introduces her to a different type of life...one filled with passion and spontaneity.

But loving him, means giving up the life she has known. Although, she would get to live in the Mill he so carefully restores...complete with a roaring fireplace and a huge dramatic picture window.

 

I can't give away anymore without ruining the ending. I loved every minute of it. All That Heaven Allows is romantic and complicated. It has wonderful scenes of life in the 1950s - both among the country club set and the regular folks.

It will tug at your heart strings and make you sigh...the perfect movie night.

 

Mary McLeod Bethune: She Has Given Her Best

I first heard about Mary McLeod Bethune when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute.

She was an early graduate of my college - and an African American woman. I knew she had gone on to become one of the greatest women in our country. She was so well known that she earned the status of being featured on our postage stamps.

But I didn't really know much about her.

As I researched Mary McLeod Bethune for my book, When Others Shuddered: Eight Women Who Refused to Give Up. I learned a bit more about her remarkable life:

• She was the 15th of 17 children, born to former slaves.
• From an early age, she hungered for education.
• She graduated from Moody Bible Institute with a desire for missionary service to Africa - an opportunity she was denied because of her race.
• Undeterred, she started a school for African American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, that went on to become Bethune Cookman University.
• She was asked to work with Franklin D. Roosevelt and led many African American organizations for women and children through the early to mid 1900s. 

Each of these things is impressive. But as I read, I was also deeply moved by her determination, resiliency, and passion. Mary McLeod Bethune dreamed big - and achieved even bigger things.

 

She never let anyone deter her, and, even in the face of racial injustice, never let hate dominate her life. She had pride in who she was and in her people. She refused to be afraid, facing off against the Ku Klux Klan.

 

As I walked by her grave, planted over the former garbage dump that she first purchased and turned into a major university, I was humbled. Her gravestone reads: "She has given her best, that others may live a more abundant life." The bell hanging up to the right, signifies her desire to "ring" the bell of education and freedom for African American childeren in the South at a time when that was not a possibility.

As I toured the Bethune Foundation that ocupies her former home. I saw her desk, the sun streaming into her bedroom, a velvet dress laid across her bed. Her home has been turned into a place that serves as an inspiration to others. I almost felt like she would walk into the room and greet me.

She didn't, of course, but her students did welcome me. Her college, Bethune Cookman University, is filled with students who are learning and achieving and growing.

This is a woman I wish I could have known.

Mary McLeod Bethune wrote: "My love is a universal factor in my experience, transcending pettiness, discrimination, segregation, narrowness and unfair dealings with regard to my opportunities to grow and serve. Through love and faith and determination I have been persistently facing obstacles, small and large, and I have made them stepping stones upon which to rise."

And rise she did.

God blessed the world through this remarkable woman.

 

I love PARIS in the Spring Time!

 

 

Lately, I've been living vicariously through one of my college students as she made a springtime trip to Paris. Ahhhhh....to be in Paris, again.

 

I love that city - I've been obsessed with it since high school French class. My friend, Cathy, and I were so Paris-crazed, that we talked her parents into inviting a foreign-exchange student to live with them. He was French, indeed, but did not live up to our teenage fantasies of the cute Parisian boy. He was averse to showers and a bit of a grouchy loner.

 

Just after I was married, I finally took a trip to Paris with my husband. We rode the Metro, visited the Notre Dame, and ate croissants in a cafe. Paris was everything I'd imagined and more. It was a bit gritty - a tad decadent - and so, so, so gloriously cool.

 

We loved the Rodin museum with its enormous front lawn and statue garden. We listened to jazz on a boat docked at the Seine. We ate anchovies on pizza in a dark alley-side cafe. We sauntered through book stalls and climbed the steps of Montmartre. I felt like I was Audrey Hepburn.

 

This Christmas, Milt gave me this little vintage travel book to add to my growing vintage Paris collection. It is from 1960, probably given out at the airport for tourists.

 

 

Now, while I loved Paris in the early 1990s -
I can only dream of what it must have been like in the 1960s... J'adore!

 

 

The book highlights things to do and places to see - some of which are no longer around.

 

 

Of course, there are the Paris women - tres chic!

 

 

But, I've saved the best part for last. In the back of the book, tucked away like little memories of a glorious trip, were mementos.

 

A ticket to Sainte Chapelle Exposition and another to the Tombeau de L'Empereur. An airplane cocktail napkin, soft and faded. A card from the Oberon paris - "Do Your Shopping." And a receipt from a restaurant at the Hotel Lutetia, 43, Boulevard Raspail, Paris...

 

Sigh....

 

For now, I'll tie on my vintage scarf and pick up my glittery Paris bag, and pretend (for just a moment), that I'm about to leave for my favorite city in the world.