Mrs. Barnes

My sixth grade teacher was Mrs. Barnes. She also used to be my after school German teacher in 4th grade, but I'm afraid the only things that stuck to me from that were how to count to 10, "I am sick" and "there is the bear." On the first day of school to learn everyone's name, Mrs. Barnes had everyone make up an adjective beginning with the same letter as his or her name. For some reason I can still remember "beautiful Barnes" "careful Chip" "Courageous Camilla" and "Kookie Kim."The only adjective I could come up with beginning with K was Keen."Keen Kathryn." Boy was I an awkward sixth grader with my purple sweat pants and my round green glasses. Everyday we'd come in and do SSR(silent, sustained, reading). Then we'd do reading comprehension activities in these ancient looking books called Barnellofts. None of the other six graders used them and I always thought the only reason we did was because of the title's similarity to my teacher's name. Then we'd do math. I've always stunk at math. Mrs. Barnes was very specific with how to do math problems. You'd fold you're scratch paper up into 16's and make a column on the left hand side for answers. When you finished the assignment you'd take the paper up to her desk and she'd grade it right there in front of you. It made me so dang nervous! Then we'd go to recess. All of my friends had gone to Mr. Strong's 6th grade class so it was hard adjusting from playing sports and chasing games at recess to staying inside and playing Uno every day or jump roping. Then we'd come back in and spend the rest of the day on history and geography. Mrs. Barnes was very gung ho about geography. She made us draw maps quite frequently and I was often frustrated because I'd spend so much time on my maps, but always get B's because they were never as neat as the other girls. I guess though I got my revenge in PE since there didn't seem to be any athletic girls in my class. Anyway Mrs. Barnes also had a tape with all kinds of geography theme songs on it. I can still sing the European and African Country theme songs and to this day use them to remember where things are. However, I'm afraid our theme songs were cut short. I never learned the full states and capitols song because one day Mrs. Barnes informed us that she had lung cancer and would be missing lots of school. That's when our substitute Miss Morgan took over. She was an older lady retired from teaching and seemed to wear lots of purple velvety sport outfits. She liked to give us word searches and bribe us with M&M's. She was a very nice and grandmotherly lady but didn't always seem to be quite aware of what was going on or what curriculum we needed to be learning. But our class held together and we helped each other learn new things. Every so often Mrs. Barnes would drop in for a few hours and ask us for advice on her new wigs or tell us about the fun she was having driving around in her new red beetle. We saw less and less of her as time went on. By the end of the school year I'm not even sure if she was able to make it to our 6th grade graduation. About a year later Mrs. Barnes died. I've always remembered something she said around the first week of school, "look around this room. Look at these people. These people will be part of your core social group as you continue through Jr. High and High School. Get to know them well so you can rely on each other and help each other out." We certainly did. In that same sixth grade year 2 boys in my class got into a severe car accident leaving one of them mentally disabled. One girl lost her mom and our playground burned down. Mrs. Barnes' death was just the beginning. The next year one of our friends got a brain tumor and later died. Events like that continued and almost every year that group of six graders had to cope with at least one new tragedy. But I think we managed well. People used to say of my year in school "that's one unique group of kids. Look at all they've gone through." We've done well though. I'd like to think it had a little to do with Mrs.Barnes' example of optimism through her cancer that inspired us. Yes maybe we were the first group ever at Mountain View to not have a state championship and maybe our grades weren't as high, but we sure gained some character sticking together through all those experiences. I'm grateful for them and I'm grateful for what I learned in sixth grade from Mrs. Barnes.