From My First Through-Back Thursday

I don't have that many pictures of myself. Thursday's are stressful on Facebook!

 Here I am teaching in central Kentucky back in the late 80's. I think this was my 3rd year teaching. I was a social studies teacher. The "posters" in thesecond photo were made by moi from recent issues of National Geographic and featured images from cities across the USA. I think I made 12 of them. I used them to get my students to compare their world of rural central Kentucky with other places around the country. I've always thought it was important to develop in students an ability to use data to form opinions and to compare the things they know with the larger "knowing" all around them. The five in the second photo are Tulsa, Milwaukee, San Antonio, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They also include maps of the cities and I had a set of map reading activities for the students to do, as well.

The little guy in the picture has a story, too. He was such a good-hearted little imp: ornery to the core. We got along well, though he knew how to push adult buttons without having to work too hard at it! He was often in trouble and on more than one occasion got a "woopin'" from the principal. 


He was of a shorter stature than most of his peers, and when he ran, he had an unusual gate. He lived with his father, the result of a BAD divorce. His mother left with her lover and moved to Florida and he never saw her. Early on, I realized that he had trouble retaining information, and so I did a review of his files. The first thing I noticed was how his grades had gone from A's in middle Elementary to B's and then C's in 5th grade. I asked his father about this, but he didn't seem to think all that much about it. 
So I continued my exploration by obtaining his confidential files that contained information from his parent's divorce--notes and things they'd sent to former teachers and school officials that were kept incase things got "ugly" again regarding his custody. And it was there I found an obscure little reference from a torn doctor's note attached to the back of a note from his mother that said something like, "cafe au lait spotting indicative of this condition." 
I then sought out a consultation from my doctor--who had been an elementary school teacher before she went back to med school. She told me to explore a likely cause. I did some further research and all the signs were pointing toward it. Then I found a way to contact his mom long distance, and she confirmed that he had a condition called "neurofibromatosis". 
The long and short of it was that his father didn't know this--or so he said. And the reason he had difficulty running was that in all likelihood he had cysts on his hip joints. Ergo, I) NO MORE Woopin's, and 2) Dad got more proactive getting him medical help; although I knew that money would be an issue. I wasn't no Mother Teresa--I didn't save him, but I would like to think I got the ball moving in the right direction. The following summer, he and his dad moved away.