Best fictional teachers!

 
Do you remember when the long anticipated letter would arrive at your home...fresh off the mimeograph machine from school, with the class supplies list and your classroom teacher assignment tucked inside?  Oh, the  conversations that went on for weeks before it finally arrived!  Long talks at the swimming pool, lying on beach towels on the hot cement and wondering who your homeroom teacher would be.  Long telephone chats about who you would get for English--the hard one who would teach you something, or the "fun" one who ran a loose ship and you knew you would get away with doing and learning very little.  Discussions while pedaling your bike to the park about which math teacher would be most helpful for a girl who was hopeless when it came to math.  Who who who?  Who would I get?  Sometimes life was good, better, best and you got just who you had hoped for, and other times, well, other times you kind of felt like you got the headmistress in Matilda...

Sometimes the Ms. Trunchbulls of the teaching world made you yearn for some of your beloved fictional teachers...those who understood you and sympathized with you and loved you.  Maybe they were only fiction, but the place in my heart for them was certainly real!  Were any of my favorites on your list as well?

How about Miss Stacy, Anne of Green Gables beloved teacher?  Or, for that matter, Anne herself.  

I've visited Laura Ingalls Wilder's (a real person, but semi-fictionalized in A Little Town on the Prairie) one room school many times in DeSmet, SD. 

Or how about sweet and loving Miss Honey (Matilda)?  Didn't you yearn for her in second grade?  I had Miss Olsen instead, and I have to say, she was almost as nice!

I didn't read these books until I was an adult, but wouldn't you have loved to have Professor McGonagall as a teacher?!

And, if we are talking about dreamy teachers (were we talking about dreamy teachers who made us a little weak at the knees and who made it difficult to concentrate on the subject at hand?  If we weren't, we should...we all know we had at least one of these teachers!)  In real life it was my seventh grade homeroom and science teacher, Mr. Kamen, who awed us all on the first day of class by standing on his head on his desk and drinking a glass of water upside down.  I'm sure it was to make a scientific point, but oh, how cute he looked!  If I had to dream about a fictional teacher, it's an easy choice...

hmm...come to think of it, he looks an awful lot like Mr. Kamen!

So many wonderful memories, so many wonderful teachers who have touched our lives and enriched our spirits, whether in a classroom or through the pages of a book. And while I personally never dreaded going to school (well, unless it was a math test today) I think all of us can giggle at little Peggy Ann's reluctance in Shel Silverstein's fun poem I Cannot Go To School Today.

"I cannot go to school today"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry.
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox.
And there's one more - that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut, my eyes are blue,
It might be the instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke.
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in.
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My toes are cold, my toes are numb,
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There's a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is ...
What? What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is .............. Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play!"

Have a wonderful day!