Poetry Monday: My Favourite Teacher . . . and Random Funnies

Blogger is acting up -- there are three different fonts in this post and I didn't do anything to make it that way and can't figure out how to easily fix it! I'm sorry about that; one of the fonts is much smaller and won't enlarge. Ah well, worse problems are probably in store when I switch to the new version .......

It's Poetry Monday, and this week's topic is ..... OUR FAVOURITE TEACHERS.

Join Diane, MotherOwl, Mimi, contributors in the comments, and me, as we immortalize our favourite teachers in poetry form.

You can leave your poem in the comments, or post on your own blog. If you do the latter, please leave a comment so we can find you.

Use the topic, or choose another. Write a poem yourself, or borrow one from someone else (with attribution, of course). The idea is to enjoy ourselves and work the ol' brain cells.

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Having said that, I'm going to give my brain cells a rest and re-purpose (ahem) a haiku I wrote a few weeks ago.

I wrote it to submit to a friendly competition as part of Fran Hill's book launch at her blog Being Me. Fran is a writer and English teacher in Warwickshire, England, as well as a blogger, and she has a wonderfully dry sense of humour.

This link will take you to her post about the haiku winners as well as the rest of the entries. There are a lot of fantastic little poems there that are well worth a read.

While you're there, you might also check out Fran's book which was the subject of that book launch. The title is "Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean?" and it sounds like a good read.

I've already written about My Favourite Teacher, here, and included the background which led to this poem.

In summary, my favourite teacher was Mrs. M, and she was my teacher from Primary to Grade Three in the tiny country school in our community. She was a good and kind person, a born teacher, and provided us with a wide range of experiences in art, cooking, music, and tactile play as well as our regular curriculum.

And she did it all while very crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. In those days there was no medicine that could help slow the progress of the disease, and not much in the way of pain relief either. Mrs. M drove a Volkswagon Beetle to school, used a cane to make her way painfully to her desk and rarely moved until the end of the day when she made the reverse trip to her car.

But I especially remember her car for another reason. For lunchtime, in the warm days of June at the end of the school year, Mrs. M sometimes took us to the provincial park just across the road from the school. She drove slowly on the dirt road that wound through the forested area of the park, all the way to the large grassy intervale with picnic tables, while we kids with our lunchboxes walked in a long line behind her like little birds following their mother.

It seems to me like a metaphor for the way she led us through the first important years of our schooling, helping us go places and enriching our lives.

My haiku is simply called "Teacher", the form of address we often used when asking questions.

I feel so lucky to have had her in my life.   

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Teacher

Chicks with mother hen
Stepping out into the world --
Watch, try, learn, grow, fly

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And we need some funnies to top off the day, don't we? I apologize if I repeat ones I've used already. I used to rename each meme on my computer to indicate that it had been used, a process which was fairly time-consuming, and eventually I fell out of the habit. Oops. Now I can't remember which ones I used and which ones I didn't.That's kind of how my organizational habits in other areas of my life fall into disarray also. 

But that's a whole other topic, which just might make its way into Poetry Monday one of these days :)

Here we go, with no particular topic and in no particular order:

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Wishing you a week of pleasant memories and funny moments to enjoy.

In the meantime, who was your favourite teacher? Or did you have a difficult school life, like some of the other haiku writers on Fran's blog?

Next week's topic will be ........... ANTS ..........

Thanks for the idea, Red -- my fellow Canadian, found at Hiawatha House!