I got this pic out of my yearbook for that year ! Yes she is still alive.
I had a teacher named Miss House. She was cruel and a bully. I was always sort of afraid of her. I was not afraid because of her inability to teach but how she made me feel on a daily basis.
Miss House was a blonde home economics teacher in 1964 who has raised one of the biggest tea partiers in my old hometown. He also ran for office and he and I had a huge fight on facebook back in 2009. He lost and for that I am very grateful. Forget him...that was diared some time back.
Miss House , a woman who I can still see as I want to tell her what a know nothing she truly was. She wore her hair in a french twist. She was the typical sixties example of how a young impressionable female SHOULD NOT be taught.
Miss House strutted around in spike heels explaining to proper young women how the perfect wife should be. The wife of every man was to have a good cook in the kitchen who knew how to sew. She would get about 6 of we girls in the home economics kitchen and have us cook up link sausages ( something I cannot order or cook to this day) scramble eggs, squeeze orange juice and make coffee. We did not have breakfast back in the day and at 11AM one could get hungry cooking up that grub for Miss House to gather up the goodies we cooked and take them to the football players to eat.
(I wonder what sausage they were serving up). Linked hot sausage I am quite sure.
She always complained about how the eggs were too done or the sausages were too brown but that was cooking lessons and that was not the rub she gave me.. The real humiliation was the sewing thing. There were only 7 sewing machines in the class and 30 students. We had to either sew at home or stay after school for her projects. My mother had a sewing maching so I was pretty lucky. My Mother hated sewing so I was kind of on my own. The assignment was to make a spring dress and wear it to school.
We picked our patterns and had a deadline. I chose a pink fabric and decided I wanted a sleeveless straight dress with a Tulip in the front. Green leaves and a darker pink for the tulip. The neckline would be scooped and I struggled plenty with that dress.
Every chance I got to get near the machine I worked on the dress at school. I got tips from my more domestic classmates and actually was very excited about the dress.
I worked, hemmed, stitched and finally it was done. We had to wear our dresses after completion and model them for grade.. A huge grade that counted for the whole semester. She of course had her pet students. I guess we all had teachers like this at some time or another and I had two other idiots but this one took the cake in her illusion of females.
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With this war on women today, I am quite sure Miss House, if she is still alive and I heard she was is leading the charge in some tea party kitchen. She never missed an opportunity to be downright cruel to our less than feminine females or possibly gay students. She did not like me for several reason but mostly because my people had much pull in the town and were doctors and lawyers and there was a lesbian aunt in the family who married earlier and son was a principal in El Paso. I was quite in her class and that was not me at all. She would make snide remarks to several of we girls like,
you slump too much and look like a mushroom. Tuck her blouse in, you look like an unkept street bum. She made remarks to poorer kids saying mean things like , " If you brushed your teeth your wouldn't be absent with toothaces and then proceed to call them "Green breath". You get the idea of what kind of person she was.
The day came for me to wear my dress that was made all from my little hands. I was a 9th grader and Freshman in high school and wanted to do well. I actually never made below a C that I recall until I hit that class.
I still see the classroom and the kind of day it was. It was spring and the sun was shining brightly through all of those windows. I stood up and walked to the front of the class as my predecessors had done. This woman. This vile, hateful woman walked in front of me and with finger pointed laughed and laughed till she bent double. She said,
" What is that thing on the front of that tacky looking sack"? My lip quivered as I saw some with their heads lowered, some students laughing with her and some cowering.
I stood there as she walked around me in her spiked heels laughing. I never took my eyes off the class. I turned to her and said, " You are a witch". I then walked out of her class yanking the tulip off the dress. She failed me. Right then and there she failed me and told me I would have to attend summer school.
I could have went home and told Mother about what really happened and Mama would have snatched her french twist down but this was my first year in high school. I did tell my older sister who still gets a kick out of reminicing about the bully whenever I ended up at the Vice President's residence, or appear on TV or radio, or given some recognition for something I feel I do to make people feel better rather than worse.
I realize Miss House could have caused me to totally fail in life had I let that woman totally destroy my self esteem. I, fortunately did well in other areas of life, never became domesticated until I was retired and then just enough to keep the house straight and some grub for folks to eat. I became a boomer with a different ambition and worked jobs to stay out of the kitchen, never thread a needle, and have never lost a husband over a burned meal. I divorced all of them and not the other way around.
She didn't know jack squat about any man and I believe may have been typical of the 60's Home Economics ( a required class) teacher. I went out and stood up for the Pill, Feminism, equal rights and against bully people like Miss House.
So, Miss House after all these years, this one is was for you. You were a miserable teacher and thanks for making me more of a Julia Sugarbaker than a My little Margie. If I was the person then that I am today, she would still be trying to figure out how she lost her job, why she couldn't get another and how she got sued over such a thing as an ugly tulip dress. I never sewed again.