That's a wrap! And the story of my legit amnesia incident at school....

 

(You can jump to the amnesia part.) 

I was an English teacher for a long time. I started teaching AP Lit and 3 other upper level preps at Jefferson-Scranton High School in 1987. Many of you know what it's like to be only 4-5 years older than your students. Some of them were absolutely brighter than I was as well. With a Masters in Literature from ISU and about 38 years teaching mostly high school, but some at the community college and university level, I feel a little more on top of my game. But new teachers also have special powers.

RETIRED: And....she's done.I'll have to admit it feels weird. I loved my job, the kids, the people, my self-selected teaching assignment, and teaching writing. I did not like the 50 minute commute! I didn't realize it would be a 12 year gig. They got my name from one of my prior schools and the principal called--three weeks before classes began. I was set to be an adjunct, which I was able to get out of. 

THE INJURY: My husband had a long fall down our stairs and all but broke his neck in October. Spinal surgery, a few weeks in  the hospital and several months  in-patient rehab and then home. Working full time got trickier. I took the first 2-3 weeks off to be at the hospital, and when he got moved to a rehab center also in Methodist, I went back to work. Pretty much every day from mid-November to mid-Febuary I would drive the fifty minutes straight from work to hang out with him in the rehab unit in the hospital. It was exhausting. I'm a morning person. It was pretty exhausting.

Nutshell, the week he was supposed to come home I had a strange incident.  I was extremely stressed transforming the house and the stairs and buying a wheel chair, a walker, an adjustable bed.  I was worried I wouldn't be able to take care of him--would he ever be able to get down the three steps to the patio? I needed to get my lesson plans for two weeks done as I would stay home with him that long to help him get adjusted. It worked! He is doing quite well!  I'm grateful times 100 that he had not cognitive damage and that he is able to walk with a walker (and do the dishes).

AMNESIA, for real: Anyway, two days before he came home I had an amnesia episode. (Like on TV, right? But no coconut hit me on the head.) I remember stopping for pop the morning on the way to school. I remember nothing of the rest of the commute, conversations I had with colleagues, teaching about 20 min of TKAM--it's a blank. I don't remember being in the front office and leaving in a wheelchair, then a stretcher and being taken  by ambulance to the larger city next door.  My sister and sister-in-law live 25 minutes from the school, and Susan drove my car to the hospital. Jill and Susan were with me all day. I don't remember the extensive testing they did that day.  I remember waking up the next morning alone in a hospital room.  Jill and Susan came back quickly as well as a friend from DSM.

I still remember nothing of that day or evening. :(.  It's weird and sad and crazy. They said it was GTA: Global Transient Amnesia. (It's a thing; you can look it up if interested.) You can function well, but just can't create any memories. It can be brought on by jumping into extremely cold water, rigorous sex, and a few other things that didn't apply to me. BUT, it can also happen when someone is under extreme stress. That was me, I guess. 

Anyway, I didn't go back the next day and then was off with my husband caring for him for 2 weeks--scrambling on the lesson plans. My chances of it happening again are like 1 in 10,000.  It ever happening to anyone is statistically very very very low. That's why nobody has heard of it. Don't worry about having an episode.

I had already decided by that point to retire, but it kind of made me more eager for the end ,and I watched my stress pretty closely.  Returning to school was weird and then mostly fine. I had sent an email to the staff and put things on Google Classroom for my students saying it was just a medical situation but that I was just fine. Kids are pretty good at moving on. Everyone is when a situation is kind of peripheral. My son was in Thailand at the time and it really worried him--he had already dealt with his dad's partial paralysis due to the fall.  My daughter was in college and came home at Thanksgiving for a week, an art major, working on a carving project in the hospital room. My husband is an artist as well.  As his right hand is still a bit compromised, he has stopped working as a graphic illustrator. But I'm retired now anyway. And my IPERS starts coming in July.

Leaving was wicked hard because I still loved it. I had some years left in me. But I'll be OK. Fun news--I get to be the editor for a new column I pitched for the English Journal! It should be posted soon on the site. Please submit! I also want to write a book--maybe on teaching English OR being a successful neurodivergent educator. I really want to thank all of you who read this blog! I'll probably keep writing.  I'll let you know if I publish a book! 

Happy summer~

Trace

Reading AP Lang exams at home: no spoilers!

 I truly prefer scoring AP Lang essays at home. This year I am on Lang Question 3--the argument. THANK GOD. The last four years I was on Question 2 and the monotony of the rhetorical analysis over the same speech or section of a memoir? Brutal. I actually contacted the College Board this year requesting Q1 or Q3.  My husband said, "All you had to do is ask."  I'm not sure--it would seem unlikely that they even read my request and even more unlikely that they'd care. Nevertheless, a win for me as each argument has at least some freshness. There are some similar sports examples (of course), but even then, the angle is always slightly varied. Every at bat holds the opportunity for a triple; the home run is tricky due to the ambiguity and difficulty of acquiring that elusive sophistication point, but I certainly award it on occasion as they slide into home! (Sports analogy)

My son is reading for the first time--AP Calc exams!--in Thailand. The time frame for group meetings and  when the scoring window was open were both issues at first, no surprise. However, it's  fun to get texts from him about how it's going. Sounds like scores on math tests are a little more "right or wrong" than AP Lang, especially a Lang argument essay.  I think I prefer this. However, he has navigated Bangkok for the last four years, so he can pull off anything, I think. My first AP reading occurred at about the same age--I was twenty-eight. Below is the link to that.  I did a lil' too much drinking on the river walk, and I think it affected my performance in regards to fatigue during the eight-hour work days. Also, I was on Q3 for Lit and had certainly not read all the books on the list. I told Max that the first year of reading is the toughest for sure, but he seems to be doing well! (He's much smarter than I am.) 

I haven't even considered on-site reading since I started five years ago for Lang. I like that I can take breaks as needed--you just log out and can come back fresh in an hour. My reclining love seat beats a chair, and no one is judging me if I have to get up and go to the bathroom every hour or eat a bag of Bit-0-Honey in forty-five minutes. Nutshell, my two pieces of advice--if you're reading on site, consider at-home scoring next year, and if you are a first-year reader, go easy on yourself! 

To all of you currently participating in this academic game, good luck and good job! I should get back to it--I do log out when I'm taking a break like this. Sometimes I worry that some think at-home readers are slackers or dishonest. Not true! But we are probably more comfortable. We can also do it from Iowa or Southeast Asia. Did I mention I'm proud of him, and glad he's not the type of reader I was thirty-plus years ago? 

https://tracetheelateacher.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-less-than-stellar-entry-to-ap-reading.html