Sigh, Ms.Clear...

I remember the summer before eighth grade, right when you start freaking out about school, when i finally learned who my teachers were. Going through my schedule, i was thinking "science teacher - Ms.Burroughs, I heard she was nice...Mr. Pendergrast for orchestra again, can't wait, math - Mr. Clarke, everyone says he's funny in a weird way, that should be interesting, block is..." and then I nearly had I heart attack when I saw the teacher's name. Ms. Clear. This was the same teacher who when she asked her class last year to fill out a paper saying whether she should teach eighth grade next year or not, and not one person answered yes. This was the same person who made a racist comment to a student, and didn't know where Connecticut was on the map. Right at that moment, i knew this year was going to be a long one.

Now, this assessment was not wrong. The year was full of blunders and an unnecessarily large workload. Incidents that made for hilarious stories were also there too, like how the first day of school she had to count the days of the week on her fingers because the math that went along with "if you're absent one day you have one day to make up the work" was too difficult to fit into her head. It was definitely a hard year that made me incredibly happy when it was over (at the time that is). But when I look back on it, the most annoying part of the class (the huge mundane workload) was getting me more ready for high school then I thought it would.

For example, I remember reading this book called The Pearl. We worked on this short story for at least a month, finding 10 different ways to describe the theme and drawing at least 10 different pictures of those themes. I hated it, and I hated it with a passion. We worked on this material for a very long time, and I was personally finished with it about the second week (repetitiveness tends to bug me a lot). But what I have now realized is that we do this in high school too. We have been working on To Kill a Mockingbird for awhile, which is not too bad because I like this book a lot...but repetitiveness is not my favorite thing for any aspect of life. So I've just got to learn to like it, because this type of education isn't going away any time soon.

So I guess I should thank Ms.Clear for this and the very few other things (like the blog we also did in her class) she taught me that was useful quite useful for high school. Because of her, I have many funny stories and some high school knowledge in my head. She is my Boo Radley, in her own way....