A memory to start the new year on a high-note...

When my Dad got to be in his late 70s he loved to remember the past, whether it was funny, sad, rough, or sentimental. He used to tell me that there are only two things in life: anticipation and reminiscence.

On this second day of the New Year, I just want to reminisce. In 1989, my Father had a heart attack and I drove across the country from Pennsylvania with my daughter so we could see my Dad, and so she could find a place to live since she was going to attend WSU that Fall to earn her Master’s Degree in Analytical Chemistry.  The short story of my Dad: he lived through the heart attack, and on into his 85+ year, and died in 2006. But that is for another day.

My daughter, Melody, loves to teach, and in fact, she is going to be student teaching in middle school in a week or so.  She found out how much she loved teaching at WSU.  Her rules for her classes were very simple: show up, do the work, ask questions, and for her Lab classes: keep your Lab notebook up to date; it must be legible [if she couldn’t read it, you failed]; show your work so that she could help you figure out where you went wrong if you didn’t come up with the correct answer [no work to see, you failed].

Her peers, other Teaching Assistants who knew her, nicknamed her HELGA, Iron-booted Lab Instructor from Hell.  They knew  Melody wasn’t nearly as tough as the name implied, but that didn’t stop the tormenting of her with HELGA!

She relayed the story to me, so my evil-side made a T-shirt for her. It was shocking pink with black lettering: HELGA TA FROM HELL. The TA part was 6” tall and the rest was only 1” tall.

HELGA

TA

FROM HELL

Melody got a kick out of the T-shirt and wore to her first Lab Class one semester.  As she tells it, she was sitting on the desk in front of the class, feet dangling, waiting for the students to file in and find seats. One girl was quite late and the only seat left was right in the center seat of the front row.  Melody described the girl as slinking in, head down, trying to avoid eye contact.  Melody continued to talk to the students, and finally the late girl looked up at Melody, and saw her T-shirt.  The first words the girl whispered were: “Oh, Sh*t” and that brought laughter from Melody.  I just love remembering this story.

The girls who took her class found that they were already chemists: Melody taught them that if you bake chocolate chip cookies, or anything else for that matter, you were already a chemist, and all you needed to add to it is the nitty-gritty details. For the young men in her classes she had other analogies.

I spent the first day of this year anticipating football winners: Go Ducks! Go Ohio State! And, today, I reminisced a little. 

Now it’s time to go back to some knitting and quilting!