Teach your Children Well – – –

Jack just makes it in time – –

I taught an on-line class yesterday morning and it brought back many memories.

To explain – –

I taught classes in a Scottish college for over twenty years starting with apprentice house painters and ending with management students. I had the opportunity to retire at either age 60 or 65 and might have gone on to 65 if only for the sheer pleasure of actually teaching. But the bureaucracy and paper work was so awful that I chose 60 and don’t regret it.

However, I never lost the pleasure of actually helping a group of people to navigate their learning experiences and I’ve been lucky to continue to be able do that.

Following retirement, I was contracted as a consultant and taught classes in lots of exotic places, then after moving to the US it was mostly more about Scottish culture, language and music.

Sometimes this was very informal just sitting down with friends and sometimes much more academic in lecture halls or classrooms.

In some ways performing as a singer for audiences gave me more confidence to do something similar in front of a group of students. Eventually, I think, it worked the other way too.

The two big role models in my teenage years were both teachers – George Simpson was the woodwork teacher at the high school I attended and Jim Yeats was the newly appointed young painting instructor when I moved on to the local college as part of my apprenticeship as a house painter. If I saw them walking in town and they said hello I felt like I was walking on air!

So if I managed to be a role model myself, then I’ll be well satisfied!

The Spider on the Dashboard

I was driving home from a loooooong three-day conference. A colleague had gone with me, and I stayed the night with them before doing some additional meetings the following day, then getting into my now-hated car for one more long drive. Destination: home.

Which made the road feel shorter. Two and a half hours didn’t sound so bad. And I had covered about 45 minutes of it when the spider appeared.

Near my left eye, on the edge of the window.

I was driving on a divided highway. I did not swerve. Apparently spiders have good hearing because after I screamed the fuzzy black thing – about the size of a nickel – disappeared into the window frame.

That suited me just fine. It was one of those figure 8 curvy legged pointy butt spiders. The kind you can’t always tell about in terms of them being a harmless but big-on-jumping house spider, or that nasty biting toxic mouse spider.

Either way, I wasn’t happy.

I can’t say the spider looked very happy either, as it slowly emerged from the black rubber crack of the window frame and—I am not making this up—regarded me from about six inches away. I could tell what it was thinking: will I jump and maybe kill us both, or will I leave her alone until she parks, and then jump?

It was me or the spider. I pulled slowly over and powered down my window. The spider may have looked mildly surprised as it suddenly found itself on the lower end of the rubber crack. It disappeared again. But by then so had I—to the other side of the car, scrambling over the gear shift.

That’s when I discovered the second spider.

Do they travel in pairs, those little fuzzy ones? I don’t know. What I do know, now, is how quickly I can exit a parked car straight through an open window. With only light bruising.

Brushing myself off, I decided to go for a little walk to give the pair time to vacate the car. When I returned, there was no sign of either. This I considered a good thing, because, you know, they didn’t want to set up housekeeping in the car any more than I wanted them to, you know, establish a spider homestead in there. Don’t they have, like, a thousand babies at a time or something?

I put the windows up and down a few times. No sign of either. I re-entered traffic and drove home without incident.

The next day, halfway to Knoxville, one of them crawled out of the window frame and gave a cheery wave—or maybe it was the finger—before crossing the windshield in my line of sight.

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