Who was your best (or worst) elementary school teacher?
Submitted by Minnow.
Luckily, I was fortunate enough to have several good elementary school teachers; I could not even begin to choose the best of my first, second, third, fifth, and sixth grade teachers. They were all good people and good teachers from whom I learned to love and appreciate reading and creative writing as well as history and the social sciences.
My fourth grade teacher, however, used to put my name on the board because I did not pronounce my own name as he felt it should be pronounced. We had a very adversarial relationship. When I wanted to stay inside at lunch and read a book, he would force me to go outside and yet, when I wanted to go outside he would make fun of me, saying "You couldn't find a good enough book, huh?" before letting me go. He told me I had to be in the school play, in the role of Santa, even though I was chubby and shy and wanted to only play an elf. Then, when I had played Santa and all the other kids were telling me how funny and cool it was, he told me I should have done better.
What made it all the more painful was that he was not mean, or cruel, he was just inept. He had no idea how to deal with kids like me – shy, smart, and inclined to live inside my head. My mother, who was also an elementary school teacher, although at another school, and he were good friends. The summer before fourth grade, I had dog-sat for my teacher and really enjoyed it, as his dog was a lovable old basset hound that got on well with my own black lab. On the occasions I met my teacher that summer, before he went on vacation, and after when he picked up his dog, I really liked him too and was looking forward to being in his class.
Unfortunately, that ended on the first day of class when he put my name on the board for chewing my nails. Which made me so mad that I kept doing it on purpose after that, just to drive home the point that he was not the boss of me. Hell, I still chew my nails, just because the memory pisses me off so much.
Ah well. It's over and done and has been for many years.
It's actually a bit ironic in that, these days, I sometimes teach kids. And whenever I find myself ready to scold a child for doing what is natural for him or her, or I find that I am ready to write names on the board for kids just trying to figure out their own way of doing something, I take a deep breath, think about fourth grade, and then find a more productive way to work with and teach the kids in my care.
When I think about elementary school these days, I try to remember that over all, it was pretty good. I really liked four out of five teachers, which is rare enough that I feel pretty grateful to have known the good ones, and to not feel especially bad over the one bad one.
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Left From Seattle 
Fannishly Devoted: To Serve All My Days
I decided to get my geek on tonight by sitting down and watching a few of the fan productions I had heard or read about on various blogs and news sites.
As a preface, I should say that I had not expected much. I have seen fan productions before and, generally, while I applaud the effort and creativity involved, I think they are pretty hard to watch. Bad acting, bad sets, bad effects, bad, well, everything seems to be the norm.
Things have changed.
I started with the production Star Trek: New Voyages and their episode "To Serve All My Days". New Voyages is a fan production attempting to finish the Enterprise's original five year mission (the original series ran only three seasons) and cast young actors as Kirk, Spock, Bones, and everyone else. For this episode, they even managed to get Walter Koenig to reprise his role as Chekov!
The production values are quite high; sets and props have been methodically and faithfully replicated from the original series and the computer effects are only a few notes short of professional quality. More impressive is the quality of actors they have enlisted; I am unsure as to whether these actors are professional or amateur but the level of professionalism is quite clear. All the actors do a credible job of being the character without trying to imitate the actor who made the role famous.
However, the highest quality was reserved for the story. The story in this case has as an A plot an attack against the Enterprise by what looks very much like a Klingon ship and a B story revolving around Chekov and a sacrifice that causes him to age twenty-five years in the course of a day and the reflections this causes him to have on his career and life in Starfleet. All I can really say is that it felt like an episode of Star Trek.
And because of that one thing, I will be eagerly awaiting their next episode.
I'll post up comments about the other fan films as I have time and get around to watching more of them. In the meantime, relevant links: Star Trek: New Voyages, Wikipedia Entry for New Voyages, Wikipedia for Star Trek Fan Films.
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