When I started second grade at my new school, my favorite teacher was Miss Bubble, and I quickly discovered that she was every other second grade student’s favorite as well. Her last name was not actually ‘Bubble’; her full name was so long and hard to pronounce that we all called her that.
The name suited her to a “T.”
Miss Bubble was not my teacher; I met her in the hallway on my first day as I headed to my classroom. I got lost but she showed me where to go and pointed out the lunch and girls’ rooms on the way as she introduced me to my new classmates. After class that day and every day after that, I saw her in the corridor outside of the second-grade classrooms, monitoring hallway activity. We always greeted her; she made us giggle and laugh at her jokes and silliness.
She had a kind word for each student and knew everyone’s names; I never found out how she knew mine! Kids waved their papers with their “A’s,” “100’s,” and “Well Done’s,” and she ooh’d and ahh’d, and then had encouraging words for the children whose grades were less than stellar. We wanted to be better students and better people because of Miss Bubble!
When kids got rowdy because of a difference of opinion, she calmly stepped in and had us debate or defend our stance until resolution, a strategy I am sure deflected many a school yard fight.
Miss Bubble coached and cheered for us on the playground and whispered reassurances to us as we tackled second-grade life. She encouraged individuality as well as unity and I’d like to think that we formed lifelong friendships simply because of her influence.
I remember one Winter afternoon she proclaimed the next school day to be a “Wear Red Day,” one of many of her themed, dress-up school days that year.
At Miss Bubble’s urging, we all were to dress in our craziest red outfits and add any red embellishments we could find. I wore my father’s ugliest, red and green Christmas sweater. It stretched down to my knees, but I put a belt around my waist and wore it as a dress. I didn’t win though; Cindy Turner won with her crazy, red-streaked hair. Miss Bubble commended all of us on our participation.
In my young opinion, the other teachers, even my homeroom teacher, never held a candle to Miss Bubble. I heard them talking about her one time and even though the remarks about her were nice, I wondered if they were jealous of her popularity with the second-grade class students as they watched the children gather in the school’s hallways.
Sadly, my father was reassigned that summer, and my family and I had to move to another state before I started third grade, but I never forgot Miss Bubble’s inspiration and encouragement. I felt I learned more about life in my school hallways than in any class I had ever taken, and to this day I attribute the positive impact she had on me to my own success as a second-grade teacher. I am certain I will never be of the same caliber to my students as Miss Bubble was to all of us.
This past week while driving past the High School in my old neighborhood, I saw the school electronic billboard announce that the upcoming Friday would be “Red Day” in support of the school’s colors for the weekend Homecoming football game. It asked everyone at school and in town wear something red to show school spirit. I smiled to myself as Cindy Turner’s hair and Miss Bubble and her many unconventional activities for the second graders popped into my head. I wondered whatever had become of her.
I called my friend ‘Cindy-no-longer-Turner’ that night and we reminisced about Miss Bubble.
After I hung up, I decided to send Miss Bubble a thank-you note. Cindy said she hadn’t seen Miss Bubble when she came back for her third-grade year; she assumed Miss Bubble had also moved away. I searched the internet to try to find Miss Bubble by her real name and guessed at her age; she had seemed to be quite young in my second-grade memory.
I finally found an article that detailed Miss Bubble life and described her as having been a second-grade teacher at my old grade school; the newspaper image of her profile refreshed my somewhat faded memory of her. It noted that the fascinating woman who had been such a positive influence on so many students, had been involved in a bizarre school bus accident on a Second-grade, Spring field trip.
I read in disbelief that her family had been posthumously awarded a medal for her bravery by the Governor because she had saved the lives of all her second-grade students before succumbing to her own injuries but the timing was off – it happened almost forty years ago. That bus accident that took her life happened over twenty years before I was born.
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