Old nemesis dies, will graduate soon, the future!
We were in the Appleby's in town when the four of us, 3 students from "Appalachia in the Media" and our professor, were talking about the future. One fellow student asked why I wasn't interested in teaching in the public schools and I mentioned all the problems my husband had in public schools. She agreed there was a lot of "politics" involved and I mentioned how his superintendent let his principals do anything and the teachers were harassed and she agreed. And I mentioned the present superintendent and a man sitting across the way said she died! What a shock, and we are or were, about the same age!
But this woman was nothing like me. She followed around and did the bidding of that former, awful superintendent. But I will admit, unlike him, she really seemed to work and wasn't a publicity/glory hound like he was. Of course, her husband was an administrator and they had no kids, so she could afford to work long hours, and maybe she preferred that to coming home nights with no family to look after. She wasn't really my "nemesis," but she didn't stand up for my husband when he taught under the former superintendent's looney principals, and she was his Chapter One supervisor! She did get him a transfer, though. She was not innovative as far as teachers' needs went, but I guess she did get money for the county. I never knew Lorraine Turner personally; the whole harassment business put a wedge in what could have been a better relationship. But we're talking Appalachia; I had no family in the county so we didn't fit in, and we were lower Middle Class with my husband's lousy pay as a teacher. So the sons grew up, went to college, and have moved away. And now, I've also moved away, to a more populous area.
I hope to find some work in this area, teaching freshman English or some kind of writing/editing. Tomorrow I will be "hooded," and then I need to "complete" the mystery novel I've worked on for years!