The gang is off to Hatfield, PA this afternoon to celebrate the birthday of our very own Jeremul Abdul Jamez Sa’lami.

Catch up with y’all on the flip side, and who knows.. maybe there’ll be a fun photo or two upon our return!

I’d like to be able to track down some of my old teachers and meet with them.  I’d meet with some for longer than others, depending on what I have to say and on what develops once we sit down opposite each other.  I had teachers who really believed in me and others who really messed me up. 

I don’t really have something to say to all my old teachers.  To my nursery teacher, Mrs. Brown, I’d send her a card to say “thanks.”  To my kindergarden teacher, Sister Suzanne, I’d say “thanks for teaching me to read and sorry I poked you with my pencil that time.”  But other teachers in that godforsaken Catholic school would need to sit down and take my vitriol. 

Mr. Caron was just a mean son of a bitch.  He was intimidating as all hell and he once grabbed me by the neck with an eagle claw that nearly paralyzed me.  Pai Mei would have been proud.  Of course, when I told my parents, they were disinterested.  It seems this was nothing compared to the abuses they suffered in 1950s and 1960s Catholic schools.  Some advocates, eh?

Mr. Larkin was a little dwarf with a forked tongue and a stabbing/halting way of speaking.  He would skewer a 12 year-old kid to the point of tears and laugh maniacally about it.  Just the kind of man you want shaping young minds in your diocese.  Mr. Larkin played favorites and got to hand-pick the 10 students from my seventh grade class that he was going to make the “advanced” math group.  Despite the fact that my math grades through sixth grade were as good, or better, than half the kids he chose, I was left for dead with Sister Mary Satan and the apathetic kids.  This, in effect, sealed my fate and is why I now use a calculator to add 100+30.

Mrs. Leblanc, my fourth grade teacher, was the best teacher I ever had.  I think I saw her when I was in high school and I let her know just how awesome she was.  She thought I was going to be a scientist, but that didn’t exactly happen.  Mrs. Sousa, my sixth grade teacher, upped the ante.  She thought I was going to become president.  Even Mrs. Mello, my Computers teacher from fourth through eighth grade, thought I had potential.  She challenged me every since day and we battled like crazy, but she was molding me.  I didn’t know it at the time, but she was helping me.  It wasn’t until the end of eighth grade that she let me know she thought of me as a leader, as someone showing promise.  Her words of encouragement were enough to get me to study for her final exam for days.  I don’t remember exactly, but I think I kicked that exam’s ass. 

There were other teachers and professors from high school and college who made a difference.  But the teachers who guided and misguided me from age four to 14 were the most significant of all.  In fact, at the conclusion of this entry, it seems the positive influences outweigh the negative ones.  I guess that was the point of this whole exercise – to bloodlet some anger onto my keyboard and walk away thinking of the angels instead of the demons.