I Love New Mexico Teachers: Bunny Terry

Episode Transcript

Bunny : (00:01)
Hi there. I’m Bunny Terry, and I’m the host of the I Love New Mexico podcast. We talk about everything here. There are no boundaries. We talk to people who are from all corners of the state, people who are chefs, who are tourists, who are artists, who are Chamber of Commerce executives, and who are from ranch families that have been here for hundreds of years. New Mexico is enchanting, and it’s interesting, and I, I can’t believe I get to do this job. New Mexico is so amazing, and I invite you to come along for the ride on the I Love of New Mexico podcast. Thanks for being here in this season of kids heading back to school. I thought it, I thought it would be fun to talk about favorite teachers. I suspect that every person out there listening can name a favorite teacher, and you could also probably name your least favorite teacher and maybe several.

Bunny : (01:02)
But what seems to be universal when I talk to my friends and to family is that everyone is able to name their favorite teacher. And, and your favorite teacher is generally somebody who saw you and recognized who you were and, and, and felt, uh, sort of intuited how special you were in a specific way, and then nurtured that. And, and maybe they nurtured, maybe they nurtured this one true thing about you and gave you a love of a specific subject like math, history, science, or, or they saw that you had the makings of somebody with a specific skill. And, and in elementary school it was like reading or writing or art. I, and I know that our least favorite teachers were generally the people who, um, didn’t really believe in our potential to do much of anything. My favorite teacher without question was Mrs. Horne. And I, and I really believe that if we did, took a poll of the hundreds and now thousands of kids who went through school when Mrs. Horne was a teacher, I think probably 85 to 90% of those kids would say that.

Bunny : (02:30)
Um, Mrs. Horne was my fourth grade teacher. And for those of you who don’t know anything about me, I grew up in Logan, New Mexico, which is up in the northeast corner, 24 miles northeast of Tucumcari which is on I 40. And at the time that I was in the fourth grade in 1966, Logan had a population of 519. So not only did I know everybody in my school, but everybody knew Mrs. Horne. She went to school to church with us. Um, we knew her quite personally, but she nurtured something in every student she had. And I wanna tell you what she nur nurtured in me. And this is an essay that I wrote on the day that we heard that Willie Mays died. It still kind of chokes me up. I I don’t know why it had such a, an emotional, um, impact on me when Toby looked up from the, his reading the new Mexicans and said, wow, Willie Mays died today.

Bunny : (03:34)
And I had to go into the bathroom and cry because my favorite book in the fourth grade was The Baseball Life of Willie Mays. It’s an Unlikely Choice. I grew up in a farming community in northeastern New Mexico, where we never even watched professional baseball on tv. But I’m telling you, my favorite book in the fourth grade was The Baseball Life of Willie Mays. And that is because Mrs. Horne taught me to love reading. So I wanna go back a bit. Um, I had always had teachers who read to the class before the fourth grade and the third grade, it was Mrs. Smith, who my mom called Lorna when she saw her at church. And which was crazy because, and up to that point, I never knew that teachers had first names. In the second grade, my teacher was Mrs. Pittman, a tiny, tiny woman who reminded me a bit of a bird.

Bunny : (04:30)
Not a friendly bird, like the ones that sang sweet songs on your windows sill like in the Cinderella movie. But, but like a bird who was with beedie eyes, who was a little scary. I was afraid of Mrs. Pittman from the day school started in second grade until well into the sixth grade. She continued to always intimidate me. And she had some how instilled a respect that was born out of fear. And it, so, you know, I wrote an essay about that. A lot of people don’t agree with me, but that’s how I felt in the second grade. That was my truth. In the first grade, my teacher was Mrs. Sandoval, but first grade was really, really too much for me. Um, I didn’t love school yet. I wanted to be at home in the garden with my mom or playing paper dolls while she sewed me a new dress where she used our kitchen table as her sewing room.

Bunny : (05:21)
Or I wanted to be going up the road with her to marcine walkers for coffee. So in first grade, when Mrs. Sandoval would pull out a Dick and Jane book to read to the second reading group, ’cause I couldn’t make it into the first reading group. And when she would read in her stern voice while she pointed at the pictures as she turned each page, I, I’d look out the window and wonder what my mom was doing at that precise moment. I was certain that she needed my help at home. And here I was in the first grade, sitting in a circle reading, see, or not reading, hearing, see, spot run. I didn’t get reading in the first grade. Toby and I were talking about this last night, and I remember Mrs. Sandoval holding up flashcards, and she would hold up the B flashcard and she would look at me and say, BBBB bunny, you should know what that means.

Bunny : (06:13)
And I would look at that letter and I would look at her. I, I remember quite clearly the frustration I felt. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I didn’t know what that symbol meant. I didn’t know. I mean, I have a grandson who’s three years old, and he knows all the letters of the alphabet, but that wasn’t how life was. In 1966, we played, and then in first grade, we went to school. Anyway, I eventually got it. I started to understand phonics by the end of the year, and I got moved out of the second reading group up to the first reading group because I understood that the s in c spot run actually meant something. But fourth grade, I mean, what a gift fourth grade turned out to be. By that time, I could easily add and subtract. And I finally knew what the Times Table was.

Bunny : (07:08)
After two years of my brothers saying I needed to learn my times tables. I mean, I didn’t have it memorized yet by the fourth grade, but I had an inkling of the power that lay in the Times table after months of, of trying to figure it out. I got what the globe was. I knew that that spinning toy on teachers’ desks that we were never allowed to touch without supervision, um, meant that there was a whole world out there. I could, I could, I could finally envision those starving children in China who would’ve been happy with my supper by putting my finger on that country and then spinning it back to where I lived in Eastern New Mexico. I was fascinated with the idea of this huge continent of Africa where Lions lived at your back door and elephants ran down dirt roads. I had spent the summer between third and fourth grade and my tree house out behind the barn on our farm reading books from the Bookmobile.

Bunny : (08:02)
And with my newfound power of rudimentary math, along with books that had had had transitioned from Dr. Seuss to Betsy Tacey and Tib, I suddenly felt like someone who might be able to be one of the best readers in the room. And I also knew that Mrs. Horne was gonna my be my teacher. The the cool thing about Mrs. Horne also is that she was the mom of my very best friend in the world, in elementary school, Glenda Horne. So finally, I was going to start the school year with no fear, with absolutely no reason to be afraid. As I was a scaredy cat when I was a little kid, I lived in a home with parents who only loved and encouraged us and told great stories and created fun adventure. But I lived in fear that something scary was always around the corner. And I gotta tell you, usually it was one of my brothers ready to jump out and surprise me and make me scream. But there was nothing about Mrs. Horne that was gonna inspire fear in a child. She was kind, and she seemed to love every child she met. She was patient. She waited us, waited on us to get a concept before she hurried onto the next thing. And she hardly ever raised her voice.

Bunny : (09:25)
Every day in her classroom after lunch, recess, she’d say to us, now it’s time to get quiet and listen to the story I’m gonna read today. You can put your heads down on your desk if you want. Sometimes it’s easier to see things with your eyes closed. She never yelled at us. I already said that, but this was in my essay. She never yelled at us because there was no need. Everyone in our class wanted to please Mrs. Horne. After lunch, we’d stash whatever we were bringing into the room and the cubbies under our desks, and we’d get quiet, and then she’d begin to read.

Bunny : (10:03)
We listened to her read My Side of the Mountain and Stewart Little and Island of the Blue Dolphins. I remember going home at the end of each day while we were reading Follow My Leader, the book by James Garfield at a about a boy who was blinded by fireworks, who learned to read braille and use a guide dog. And I’d walk through the house with my eyes closed. Remembering what she said, that sometimes it’s easier to see things with your eyes closed, but also worrying that Jimmy in the book, who was fall, who was blinded by holding fireworks, was never gonna be able to lead a normal life. And then we got to the end of the book, and we learned that Jimmy had an entirely new life, even as a blind person.

Bunny : (10:51)
But what does any of this have to do with the baseball life of Willie Mace? After we listened to Mrs. Horne read each day after we were calmed down and we wanted for more, when she stopped at the end of the, of a chapter, she’d say, if you wanna go over to the bookshelves and choose a book of your own to take home, you can get one. And if we couldn’t choose, which was always my problem, because like, like when we went to the Bookmobile or to the Tucumcari public library, it, it was almost too much. I just couldn’t make a choice. She would help us. And one day she said to me, well, Bunny, I think you’d really like this one. She’s, and she handed me the baseball life of Willie Mays. Like I said before, I was a farm kid in a town of less than 500 in rural northeastern New Mexico.

Bunny : (11:38)
I rode a school bus into town every morning and home every evening. I was mildly tortured by my brothers because I was the baby and I was babied by my older sister for the same reason. For the same reason. Reading about Willie Mays and his baseball career was an odd choice for someone like me, especially in a decade when females were not allowed to get involved in professional sports. But Mrs. Horne was right. I was fascinated by Willie Mays. I read about the barriers that he broke. I read about that famous catch in center field. Uh, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I was able to watch it on YouTube, but I knew the details of many of the games that he played. I was such a fan of Willie Mays. In fact, I’m gonna tell you that reading that book fostered a lifelong love of Major League baseball. I still want to someday travel to every baseball park in the country. But what Mrs. Horne did for me, and what she has did for countless kids, is that she, without being pushy and without being bossy, and without raising her voice or being angry, she just said, I think you might find this interesting. And then she would read to us, or she would teach us a little bit about art. She would, she would take her time, you know, she’d let us paint rocks and then turn them into, glue them together and turn them into turtles. When you were in her presence, it felt like you were the only person in the room with her.

Bunny : (13:36)
So Vivian Horne is still alive. I lost both of my parents last year. And at the time, I, when, when my friend Glenda got in touch with me, she said, mama, they always, they call her, they call her mama. She said, mama doesn’t know how to get online and send you a note, but she wanted me to tell you how much she loved your mom and dad. She still goes to the Baptist Church in Logan every Sunday. She still, when you go, if you see her eating downtown in Logan, generally at the Annex, she will come over to the table and give you a hug and say something special about what she remembers about when you were a student. I saw her eating at the Annex a couple of months ago, and there was this sort of, this line. I mean, there were three or four people standing around waiting to tell Mrs. Horne, hello. So today is a shout out. It’s a shout out to all of you who are gonna open your classroom door and a couple of weeks to kids who are gonna come in, whose lives are gonna change. Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for nurturing and loving our children. Thank you for taking time and for being patient, and for realizing that someday somebody is going to get on a podcast like this when, or they’re gonna write a story and they’re going to say things like, this person was my favorite teacher. And the reason they were was because they saw something special in me and they nurtured it. And maybe like me, they’ll say, and this teacher gave me a love of reading that I would never have without that teacher’s involvement on this. I love New Mexico podcast. We hear a lot of, we hear from a lot of business owners or authors.

Bunny : (15:38)
I’d really like to hear, um, I’d like to compile a set of stories that you might have about your favorite teachers. If you want to be on the podcast and tell some stories, give us maybe 10 minutes of your time to talk about your favorite teacher, whether it’s in Roswell or Gallup or Silver City, or in Des Moines or some small town. We’d like to hear it. We wanna give some shout outs to special teachers, and you’re the people who can provide them. So today, maybe write a thank you note to somebody who changed your life as a special teacher. And if you’re dropping your kids off to school, go into the classroom and say Thank you for what you do for my kids. And thank you to all of you for listening. I just thought this would be a fun thing to talk about today as we get ready to send our kids back to school. Have a great year, all of you teachers.