I took a lot of pictures while teaching
I took a lot of pictures when I was teaching school.
If we did a project, I took pictures. If we went on a field trip, I took pictures. Halloween. Christmas. Valentine's Day. All were photo ops.
I should have thought about what I would do with those pictures.
Here I am, 6 years after retirement, and I have hundreds of pictures. Some in photo albums, some rubber banded together, some just tossed in a box.
I recognize most of the kids, but their names don't always come easy to me. Some class photos are labeled, some are not. I spend a lot of time looking at the pictures and remembering the fun times I had teaching.
Field trips to Brookfield Zoo with kids standing near the giraffe or bear to compare sizes, trips to the wind farm near Paw Paw to learn about wind energy. Overnight camp outs at the Conservation club, where we caught frogs and tadpoles, did crafts, cooked hot dogs over an open fire and sat round a campfire acting silly. Old Stone School visits, when the kids dressed in 1890s fashion and learned readin', riten' and rithmatic', taught to the tune of a hickory stick.
Now I look at the pictures and wonder where the child is, and what are they doing. Some I know about, connected via Facebook or just by seeing them around town. Others I just wonder about, how their lives turned out.
When I work with the kindergartners, their teacher always makes a point to tell me which ones are sons or daughters of former students.....amazing how many Tilton kids now have Tilton kids.
But I can't keep the pictures. So now I am just weeding through the boxes and the albums. Some people I see around town and I am putting pictures aside for them.
Maybe they'll look at them and smile at a more innocent time, a time of learning and hopefully a time of having fun.
I know I smile at their faces.
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