This Year – May 8th – 12th

Next week, May 8-12, is National Teacher Appreciation Week – a five-day week, apparently in keeping with our traditional five-day school week.  And Tuesday the 9^th is Teacher Appreciation Day.  I wouldn’t have known any of that had it not been for a FaceBook post by former student Kelli Lucero.

“For teacher appreciation week, can you name your teachers K-6??” she wrote.  While I was noodling that over (Kindergarten, Miss Thompson; Fifth Grade, Miss Hamilton) and lamenting that I couldn’t recall any of the others, my own name popped out at me.  There I was, listed as Kelli’s third grade teacher!  How many years ago, I wondered… Probably 1985/1986 when I was still Mrs. LaRue.  (Thanks for remembering, Kelli!)

Center Stage: The Amazing Mr. Wonderful

Besides her K-6 teachers, Kelli also mentioned other “amazing teachers who left a mark” – among them Mr. McQuarrie (aka “Mr. Wonderful.”) I find it more than co-incidental that just about the exact time Kelli was posting her appreciation, I was having dinner with the amazing, Don McQuarrie, himself!  We were at the Bridgewater Bistro across the river for our annual dinner get-together.  Five couples, all of whom still live in the area except for Don and Laura who moved to Linden, WA twenty-five or thirty years ago, before their own kids began school.

A few years before or after Kelli was in my class, her brother Pat was also one of my students.  He was part of the huge class that John Snyder and I team-taught.  Years later, when I was collecting memories for my book, Ocean Park School, The First Seven Decades, Kindergarten Teacher Margaret Staudenraus (also on Kelli’s list) said:

From Ocean Park School, The First Seven Decades

The first year that John Snyder and Sydney LaRue (Stevens) team-taught, they asked all the kids in the room who were related to one another to stand up.  Of their 57 students, about half of them stood.  Then they asked those who were still seated to stand if they were related to anyone in the rest of the school.  When all was said and done, only three kids remained sitting down!

Great memories! I don’t know if there is a ‘Student Appreciation Week’ or not.  Actually, it doesn’t matter.  I’m totally content with the thought that I loved every part of my 39 years in the classroom and that all these years later ‘my kids’ and I have so many wonderful shared memories!