Things I've remembered for 16 years

Ms. Liz was my second grade teacher, and my only teacher who followed her title with her first name. (I suppose “Mrs. Seligman-Bravo” would have been a cruel imposition on a class struggling with thee-syllable words.) She was also one of my few teachers cool enough to pull it off. She had wildly curly hair and the spunk to match, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the author of the “Magic School Bus” series patterned Ms. Frizzle after our own uninhibited and unpredictable classroom leader.

Ms. Liz had two sons named Michael and Jordan. For a 7-year-old boy who jealously guarded his set of 29 NBA team logo pencils, using them one at a time from least to most favorite teams (I found the Bulls, Celtics, and Mavericks still unsharpened when I was cleaning out my desk drawer in May 2008), this was reason enough to love her.

Her interest in basketball extended from her sons to her classroom, where she kept the class behaved and engaged with a game called Learnball. Learnball was the best external motivator I have ever encountered. Two teams competed for Friday candy handouts. Points could be earned in a number of ways, but I only cared about “shots”. Students who had earned the right to a “shot” for good behavior or a perfect test score would attempt to toss a Nerf ball into a trashcan on a chair. Shooters could choose from 5 positions worth 1-5 points from correspondingly difficult positions. After complex expected-value calculations, I always shot from 3 or 4. Lining up for these shots made for some of the most thrillingly nervous times of my life, surpassing job interviews and coming up just short of asking out B. Thankfully, I usually did well for my ego, and for my team. I recall one classmate (NHHS friends: it was Patrick Shea) who always shot from 5 and made it at an alarming rate. The hot-handed daredevil is now performing with Cirque de Soleil.

Ms. Liz probably liked basketball so much because she was a vocal UCLA fan. In retrospect, I’m surprised I didn’t have a major crush on her.

Ms. Liz had a bathtub in the back of her classroom. She said it was there for anyone who wanted to take a break in the middle of class and just relax and read a book. By second grade, my sense of proper behavior and overachievement were both well-developed, and I could not imagine getting up in the middle of class without express permission to sit in a tub while the rest of the class proceeded without me. Also, the tub smelled funny and I’m pretty sure its colorful paints covered up stains (but not the grossness) left by previous reclining deviants.

Ms. Liz protected my boogers (or was it my health?) like they were national treasures. On multiple occasions she stopped mid-sentence and shouted “Ryan, don’t pick your nose!” and then told me to go wash my hands. I began to perform my operations more subtly, pretending to drop my pencil so I could dig with my head under the table. But Ms. Liz was smart, and she caught me there too.

Ms. Liz always called us “smart cookies”, and I usually believed her (at least the “cookie” part). While it is usually best to encourage youngsters by complimenting their efforts instead of their talents, Ms. Liz had a special right to praise us because of how much she taught us. Of all my teachers, I think I have spent the most time musing over and using the content of her classes. Here are some examples:

• The numerical values of every letter of the alphabet – Ms. Liz liked to play a game called “100-point words” where we had to find words whose letters added up to 100 (a = 1, b = 2, etc.) I began calculating the value of almost every word I saw (and started to expand and complicate the game), and thus internalized these values. Quiz me. I dare you.
• How to spell manufacture – We had an independent vocabulary scheme where we went through long lists of words with a partner. Only when we misspelled a word would it become one of our weekly ten vocab words. I recall stumbling on “manufacture” partially because my partner said something like “menfcrt…uh…” (though there’s no way I would have gotten it even with perfect pronunciation, an example of usage, and language of origin). I was proud to have made it so far in the list, and to have been humbled by so lengthy a foe.
• Monet painted water lilies – I was assigned to use one 9” x 9” square to commemorate Monet’s birthday, so I tried to recreate one of his water lily oil paintings with crayons. I cannot imagine why, but Ms. Liz liked it a lot, and asked me to try to teach the class. Poor kids. They were all better artists than I was, and I think they knew it. But from then on, Monet was my favorite artist. And if I ever found myself in a conversation about art, I puffed up a bit and asserted, “Oh yes, I really love the way Monet uses light in his water lily oil paintings.”
• Brain teasers (quantagories) – Ms. Liz introduced us to “brain teasers” (which I found out later were only one category of brain teasers, known as quantagories). It involves an equation of abbreviations, numbers, and short words, such as 26 = L in the A (26 = Letters in the Alphabet). We got a new one every week. Oh, what fun!
• The fifty (nifty) states in alphabetical order – Every morning after the Pledge of Allegiance, Ms. Liz would make us sing a very difficult song of the 50 states in alphabetical order. Once memorized, the little diddy is impossible to forget, and I confess that it is one of my most-used intellectual tools (up there with hypothetical thought and deductive reasoning). I don’t think I’m going too far when I say that I think I would be a different man without this song.
  

At the end of the school year, our class put together a little book to thank Ms. Liz. Each student received one page to decorate however they pleased. On the back of my sheet, I wrote:

30 = SFR8WLML.

Below, the solution:

30 = Students From Room 8 Who Love Ms. Liz.