The following post was inspired by the book Close Encounters of the Third Grade Kind by Phillip Done. Mr. Done is certainly the type of teacher whom some of his students will never forget. We can all scan through the list of our grade school teachers and pick the one who made the greatest impression on our young selves. For me, it's a teacher who once invited our entire fourth grade class over for a swim in her condominium pool!
I still have her letters. One is typewritten. A few are handwritten in her familiar cursive. Another is addressed to me in the bold lettering of calligraphy.
She was my fourth grade teacher and when she left our school to get married and move to Honolulu, she and I kept in touch for several years. As Ms. Kirby became Mrs. Izumi, I followed her trail through letters to a world bigger than my own. She wrote to me about her travels to Fiji and Guadalajara and about her life in Hawaii with her new husband, a lawyer.
In her classroom, she brought the world to us. We spent a lot of time talking about different countries. I spent a lot of time with my nose in encyclopedias, turning to the page of the country we were studying, finding the big map (Kenya!) and then tracing its outline onto tracing paper for my book reports. I loved doing those reports. Back in the classroom, the posters would change from Africa to Mexico to Japan. We watched many films about various countries, following the narrator into homes of the world. Our classroom felt like a museum.




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