Christine Literacy Bio

       I learned to read in Kindergarten, but I don’t remember much about it other than the word “the” which kept stumping me. After that initial hurdle learning to read and write came easily to me. Unfortunately, our school was not exactly academically rigorous and we did very little science. Writing wasn't practiced as much as it is in today's schools and I was very nervous about writing and felt disconnected to the words I wrote. The example that comes to mind is while in fifth grade we had an assignment to research and write a paragraph about someone from early American History. My writing about Betsy Ross must have been disjointed and a mess, because the teacher trying to help me fix it and I had no idea of what she was saying or how to make it better. 

When I was in first grade, my family joined the Catholic Church. My father had grown up Catholic, but Mom had to convert. We all got baptized and went to Sunday School. There the teacher was very nice to me. I loved to draw pictures of angels and hear about the different bible stories. There were two girls in class who didn't like me and would always call me the teacher's pet, which I didn't even know what it meant. They were much better dressed, mean girls at the age of 6. Our family life was anything but consistent and we didn't make it to class every Sunday. Once I went there after being absent for weeks and the students had workbooks. There were no extras and I felt like I was putting a big imposition on the teacher. I decided I didn't like her or Sunday School any more and I definately didn't like those two girls.
In second grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Smith, who either had a nervous breakdown, or suffered from an illness because half way through the year, she left and we had a long term substitute, Mrs. Foster. Mrs. Smith was not that old but she had been a smoker and looked haggard. One time a friend of mine wanted me to come over to her house after school. Her mother was a little upset that I had just showed up and wanted me to call my mother. I told her that my mother wouldn't care that I was not home, but Chris's mother insisted. Chris wanted me to stay for supper, but her mother clearly did not want me there. The next day when I got to school, I was sitting at a table on the next thing I knew my head was slammed down on the table and Mrs. Smith was telling me what a bad girl I was to go to Chris's house without an invitation and without telling my mother. I was shocked and humiliated and said nothing about this for years. I am good at blocking things out!

In sixth grade, after writing a whole paper (in reality probably only 3 paragraphs) about Mexico we had to read our research to the rest of the class. Being an intensely shy child, this was a dreaded activity for me. On the day of my sharing our teacher was absent and we had a substitute. He was new to our school and looked like he would rather be doing anything in the world than being there. The students picked up on that vibe and most of the class was out of control all day, including my report about Mexico. I don't think I ever shared in a public school class. Feeling disconnected to my writing and sharing in groups were great sources of anxiety for me until I had a couple of awesome professors at college.

       One very unfortunate event happened in fourth grade. I had outgrown the basal readers and my teacher wanted to put me in a reading group across the hall with the sixth graders. There I was put into the lowest reading group with my brother who was in that class. It caused very bad feelings and was completely awkward for the both of us, especially since Tony had been held back in fourth grade. While I can't remember the name of the readings, they were really too hard for me. One reading was about a dog sweating and how they sweat through their mouths by panting. I got this word confused with sweeting. Why are dogs sweeting? The name Sean appeared in a text and I kept calling the boy Seen. I normal mistake. Did the teacher think to tell us how to pronounce the boy's name? She was mean and scary and I know I didn't dare ask. I wonder if Tony even remembers that it even happened.

       In sixth grade I was given the opportunity to teach a new fourth grader from Greece how to read. I was in the scary teacher's sixth grade class now, and was going back to the same fourth grade room that I had two years before. We started at the very basic level and we read together and did the workbooks for most of the year. She caught up with the reading level of the rest of the fourth graders by the end of the year. If she couldn't read a word, I read it for her and she repeated it. It helped that she was smart and motivated too. Even though I made her do much of the work, she had support and we could talk about the readings.

      When I went to Junior High School (7-9 grades) family problems overshadowed school in a big way. My mother and father got separated and there were very bad feelings. My siblings and I were left with little supervision and it was uncomfortable. I stayed at a friend's house up the street 85% of the time. My older sister was athletic and also played in the band. We shared a room. I don't ever remember discussing books with her. She kept journals, but I don't remember ever seeing her write in them. My brother may or may not have been ADHD, but he certainly drove me crazy. He constantly picked on me and I was often in tears. One thing he would do is repeat the same words over and over again, or ask me the same questions over and over until I would run out of the house, yelling "Leave me alone!" He thought it was funny. The pain of living under that constant stress and agitation still makes me want to cry and go hide. 
No one at home ever asked me about school, wanted to know if I needed anything, cared what my dreams were, or even saw me. Because I used to draw, my family made a big deal about that, which made me self-conscious for some reason. When I see students struggling now because of home life issues, I really feel for them.  Living in chaos is not helpful and I didn’t have the initiative to excel. My friends and I were left to our own limited devices for most of those years. I got in trouble for skipping school, smoking, stealing, and just being a negative jerk. I look back at those times and see such a sad, needy little girl who was really very kind and smart and good. I was just doing everything I could to tell the world that I was tough.

       My literary hero is my friend Kelleena. I spent most of my life at her house. She read constantly and skipped school all the time. She had troubles with math as well as her attitude, but she was and is damn smart!  (She's now a lawyer, even though she attended a total of about 1/2 a day of high school.) I remember her reading “Animal House” to me and discussing it with me the night before a test. It was a very fun experience, the first time I remember enjoying a deep conversation about a book. Amazingly I went on to read 1984 on my own. Kelly's house was all women. Sally, her mother was odd in a way I liked, with different boyfriends. Noreen was extremely artistic, was in the first ever alternate school when it was still down at the High School, and Kathleen who was quiet, but had a dry sense of humor, that I still appreciate. And then there was Kelleena. She changed her name when she was about 30. I am not sure why, but I still have a hard time with it. My first experiences at the Richards' home was creating plays in the basement. There were blankets hung and a stage. That basement later became party central.

       As I got older I did worse and worse in school. Partying, watching T.V., and hanging out sums up how I spent much of Junior High and High School. I was out with friends all the time and paid little attention to school work. What was the point I thought. In tenth grade we got the assignment of having to write a thesis paper which is just a research paper. I got so stressed out with the whole process, gathering information, note cards, putting them in order, making an outline, and creating coherent paragraphs! Complete overload. My mother’s friend at work ended up typing up my notecards into some kind of order and that paper got handed in. In eleventh grade, however, I did not hand in my paper and had to go to a night class for English in my senior year. Ironically, my brother was in that very same class. He really struggled, and it was excrutiatingly boring, and eventually dropped out. I finished although I have no real memory of it and was able to graduate. Any writing I did do at that time was the typical awkward adolescent broodings about boys, friends, family, and where was I going. I tried song writing as well, inspired by Pat Benetar.

The Richards women were all incredibly smart. They lived in an apartment complex and Sally worked as a nurse and had various other jobs to take care of her girls. She was way into the New Age, comic books, psychology, anything different or intense. She was way different from my mother who escaped not into books but into music and cigarettes. To this day I am always turned off by people who are way into music. However I did pick up on the whole New Age thing and read book after book about reincarnation. This idea fascinated me, that people actually get to live different lives. Growing up Catholic, we were taught that anyone non-catholic were inferior and I always wondered what would happen to them when they died. It probably wasn't taught as blatant as that but the message was loud and clear and I was really glad that I would be one of the "blessed" going to heaven. I did like Jesus, he was cool, who wouldn't? And in thinking about him, and studying his words, I came to the realization that he would not exclude grace from people who had different ideas or paths to God. What an amazing idea!

       After High School I spent a few years working and going to TC3 where I actually accumulated 30 credits. I had planned to move to Florida with my boyfriend Mike. My last year at school was devoted to finding both of us colleges in the Fort Lauderdale area. Mike was way smart and one in a long line of young Republican men that I would attract. He was cool even so. But when it came time to actually move, I couldn't. I was insecure about moving away from home and had fallen out of love with him after going through some emotional relationship stuff. Because I had no real focus or life plan, I decided it was time to college where I could at least have a chance at getting a better job or at least find love. I settled on Keuka College because that is where my sister went and they were hurting for students. Remembering my time in elementary school, where I was somewhat successful, I decided to go into teaching.

       Learning in college was just completely different from learning in high school. Maybe because I was a little older, had a plan, and had to take out loans, I worked harder than I had in years. My first essay was about a news story from the six o’clock news with Dan Rather. When I got my paper back it was a D. Now the teacher, Dr. Magnusen, (another hero of mine) who was a scientist, didn’t just hand the paper back and let it go. She took the time to talk to me about what was wrong with it and why it didn’t work. It didn't even have an introduction! She let me fix it and I got an A. The best memory I have is when I had a complete meltdown when I had to do an oral report of a book I read for British Literature and Film. Poor Dr. Richards. I showed up at his office the night of my report and told him I couldn't do it. I told him about the time I was in sixth grade and no one listened to me, I told him I was getting my period, and I told him I was having an anxiety attack. I cried and cried and he sat there and listened. After I calmed down he asked me what is the worse thing that would happen, and nothing I could come up with was really earth shattering. We agreed that he would have the other students schedule go first and then if I wanted to go too, he would say "Are there any other reports for tonight?" If I felt I could do it, I would say yes. I felt better as I went back to my room to try to write up something coherent to share. I still could only come up with four points about the book, but I did do my presentation that night and it wasn't bad! The other students asked lots of questions and I was able to answer them, because unlike in High School, I actually read the book! After that I did well in every class I took, graduating Magna Cum Laude. What an accomplishment. Still I felt dumb.

       I struggled for another 9 years, substituting on and off, waitressing, and basically existing because I didn’t feel secure in my abilities as a teacher. Trying to figure out who I am is what I obsessed over in my teens, twenties, and thirties. Before this identity crisis I never read much outside what was expected in school, much less write. I read many, many books on philosophy, religion, spiritualism, and New Age from Shirley MacLaine, Ram Das, HH Dalai Lama, Ramana Maharshi, and on and on. At this time I got very in to holistic healing, meditation, growing my own herbs and creating medicine's (which I experimented on my significant other at the time). I read more during this time than any other. I finally turned 40 and was no nearer to answering that question. And for the first time in many years, it was not a concern or constant worry.  

       Those years between graduating and actually getting a “real” teaching job were spent narcissistically thinking about who I am and why this or that happened and what does it all mean. That time was a copout. I didn’t feel good about myself. Still, I am happy for the things I studied, researched, written about, and practiced. Hopefully it opened this “small” mind to the real Big World, not just on a superficial level. During that time I studied holistic healing, grew many herbs, meditated, and created "medicine" and experimented with its effects on my significant other. Researching these things became a passion and any extra money I had went to all kinds of books on these subjects. History, religion, homeopathy, cooking, and anything that could take me out of the present moment was of interest to me.
For meditation class we studied some seriously intense books. There were other languages and interpretations to consider. Many beautiful ideas and hard concepts all designed to help the readers to find their true selves. Reading and writing at this time had moved me to a different level. So far I had learned to read for enjoyment, to read to learn how to do something, but now reading became a way to know more than what was presented. Sentences and ideas had to be thought through and discussed. I noticed how often we read something and are thinking about what is says instead of reading what it actually says. Needless to say there are shelves of very attractive but lonely, high level philosophy books from various religious traditions around the world at my house still. Maybe some day I will get to them!

      As for my identity as a teacher, that’s more tricky. I have never, not once, wanted to think of myself as a “teacher”. When I think of the word teacher it congers up images of straight-laced, judgemental, crabby, and autocratic women. That’s not me, or is it? Maybe that’s who I am to my students. How funny! My teachers were real people and unfortunately my memory is colored by the idea I have when I think of the word teacher. Where do we get these ideas? Parents, television, books, actual teachers? Society teaches us so much without us even knowing or willingly allowing it.  
The kind of teacher I have always wanted to be is one that inspires her students to want to learn and to do the best they can. Not very unusual really, it's probably what all teachers want to do. i find it hard that even with the education I have had, and continue to have, I am not able to reach all the students that I see every year. It's very frustrating! Teaching takes up so much time and energy each day, it feels like there is very little left for me at the end of the day. I used to paint and haven't done that in years.