Thank You, Mrs. Martz: My Enduring Appreciation for a Teacher's Lesson in Perception

By Carol Baicker-McKee

Mrs. Martz, Second Grade Teacher at Nottingham Elementary School, Arlington, VA

It was one of those ordinary interactions in a school day.  A week later, I doubt Mrs. Martz, my second grade teacher, even remembered it. But though more than forty years have passed, I can step back into the moment as if it just happened. More importantly, the simple lesson from that afternoon has taken root in me and grown in ways that changed my art, my writing, and even my relationships.

It's an early fall afternoon and the classroom is quiet, save for the scratching of fat pencils on lined paper as we work on our spelling assignment. I look up and Mrs. Martz nods her head. It's my turn at the easel! I reach under my chair for the smock my mother has made for me out of an old green towel and pull it over my Brownie uniform.

Me in Grade 2

I slip to one of the easels along the windows at the back of the room. For a moment, I glance out at the monkey bars shining in the October sun, but the smooth, blank sheet of newsprint clipped to the easel commands my attention; to me, painting time beats even recess. I inhale the tang of freshly mixed tempera paint, and pull the thick wooden brush handle from the plastic cup of green paint, carefully wiping the excess off along the side until the weight of the brush seems just right.

With long strokes, I lay a lush lawn across the bottom of the paper, then wait for the paint to dry so as not to muddy my colors. I use red and black and blue to construct a sturdy house with a cheery red door and curtained windows. I top the steeply sloping roof with a chimney, and scrape almost all the black paint off the brush to feather smoke escaping from it.

A few more strokes and swirls and my house is flanked by twin lollipop trees - straight brown trunks topped with circles of green. Almost done. I add a triangle of yellow to the top left corner and streak yellow rays outward from the sun. Finally a line of blue across the very top - the sky above.

And then I notice her standing quietly behind me. Mrs. Martz smiles and nods, and then pulls me to look out the window with her.

"What a beautiful day," she says, gesturing to the playground and hills dotted with houses beyond. "What interesting shapes the trees and houses make. All the branches, and the way the sides of the houses look bright  in the sunshine but the fronts are in shade. And the colors of the leaves now - so bright, so many. But I love the sky especially, the deep blue that fills all the spaces around." She looks at me and smiles again. "It's nice to take the time to really look at the world, isn't it?"

I'm confused, but I smile and agree and walk back to the easel with her. "Do you need a little more time to finish your painting?" she asks.

I'm about to say no, but then I look at my painting - and then out the window. And I get it.

"YES!"

Even though my time should be up, Mrs. Martz lets me go back to work. This time, I glance back and forth between my paper and the view out the window. It's too late to make all the changes I want to, but I add a narrow side with an extra window to my house, frowning because I can't get it to fit quite right. I snake crooked branches from the stick trunks of my trees and I dot the foliage with red and yellow, scatter more dots on the lawn below.

Finally, I add blue. Blue over the sun because I don't see it out the window, I just see what it does to the world. Blue behind everything because now I see that the sky is not just above us but all around.

I finish dissatisfied with my painting even though I'd felt proud of it before. But from that moment forward, my artwork changes. The way I approach my work changes. I struggle to figure out perspective. Mix colors to get the right shades. Try to capture shadows, flaws, details. Take my time and try again when I can't get something right the first time.

Really, everything changes in me. I find myself looking and looking, looking and thinking. Trying and trying to see what's actually there instead of what I expect or want to be there.

I've had many excellent teachers since then, and I am grateful to them all. But without Mrs. Martz, I'm not sure I'd have been able to take advantage of everything that they had to offer me.

Thank you Mrs. Martz.

Apple Tree in My Backyard. Painted from life the next spring

Supply and Demand of College Admissions and Publishing

by Cynthia Light Brown

Five people. One small hotel room. 4 colleges and 1,000 miles in 3.5 days. Joy, thy name is the college admission tour.

The three offspring (aka parasites) bickered over who had to sleep on the floor, drew straws, fussed some more, pulled covers and kicked and yanked and scrabbled and squabbled in furiously loud whispers and kept me awake until 1:00. The husband snored through it all. The 17 yo boy (aka Slob) left his smelly socks draped on chairs, beds, even the sink. The 11 yo girl got stomach aches, headaches, fainting spells—all about halfway through a college tour, which then miraculously disappeared when the tour was finished. The 15 yo girl (aka Snark) reminded me over and over of how they would soon all be off to college and out of my life never to return. By the end of the trip I replied, “Could we make “soon” be tonight?”

Colleges say they really want your child. If they really meant that, they would have information sessions on the weekend. They would hand you a cup of coffee to keep you awake during the information session where they tell you their college is unique because [insert any of 10 reasons that sound exactly like the last college]. They would hand you a bottle of water for the sweltering tour. They would have percent acceptance rates in the double digits.

But they don’t.

So the masses of unwashed hordes troupe from college to college trying to sort it all out with the dawning realization for the child that getting in will boil down to grades and luck and for the parent that if by some chance the offspring gets in you will have to pay about twice as much as you think you should be paying (this formula works whether or not you get financial aid) so maybe you’ll be just as happy if the offspring doesn’t get in after all.

Sound familiar? If publishers really wanted your manuscript, they would actually allow you to submit an unsolicited manuscript. And when you do, they would reply either way in less time than it takes a glacier to form (which in case you didn’t know, is a couple of decades in more temperate regions like Alaska and hundreds or thousands of years in Antarctica). They would thank you for the privilege of reading your amazing novel and pay you enough to live on.

But they don’t.

So the masses of writers submit and submit and submit with the dawning realization that getting published boils down to a lot of hard work and luck and even if you do get published you may end up on the midlist and never get published again.

None of which is anyone’s fault. Not the admissions officers, not the editors, not the high school seniors, not the writers. Too many people trying to get into too few slots.

We left New York City on a Saturday morning, drove to New Haven for our 4^th and last college, slogged through a campus tour (being on a weekend, it didn’t include an information session and according to the website wasn’t even a tour aimed at prospective students though there were LOTS of people and I guarantee you they were all prospective students) and drove home to Pittsburgh all in one day/night.

We had not originally planned to pack all that in one day, but the squabbling finally ended as we agreed on one thing: no way, no how were we spending another night in a hotel.

Whew.

I have only one real answer to all of the above. Gratitude that there are all kinds of great colleges with different admissions and costs, that there are so many great students, that I have a car to go traipsing about to different colleges, that I have a computer to write on, that there are so many wonderful books to read, that new options are opening up for publishing including electronic publishing, that so many editors find the time to take the care that they do on stories, that I have 3 beautiful children and a wonderful husband, an incredible writing group and bloggers, a great agent and editor, and that, mindful of the many people around the world who cannot say the same, my husband and I have a snug house with a room all to ourselves.