EDUCATION
Mrs. Nelson Wasn’t Missing
She just served up her Spam on wry
I know for sure Mrs. Nelson was most likely overjoyed when Mrs. Nelson decided to hang up her whiteboard and collect her well-deserved retirement pension.
Unlike the main character in the children’s books, the second Mrs. Nelson in question wasn’t missing. But there were two of us, and one of us had to go.
I’d managed, you see, to get some parents all wrapped up in a correspondence conflict. Even though most of my replies never saw the light of day, they all certainly belonged in a “Spam/Delete All” folder.
This is a story of an elementary communications conundrum.
Or a tale of an experienced teacher who saw herself on the retiring side of the ledger, and took full advantage.
You see, a woman named Brooke R. Nelson came to work in the school district where I taught for decades. A teacher, with my name, down to the exact same middle initial, as my Nana would put it.
This particular confusion began when our district revamped its online platform, and I started receiving panicked electronic communiqués from the parents of young children.
Does anyone know anything about elementary school kids, their folks, or the educators who teach them? If you man the barricades in grades 9–12, you don’t want to get anywhere near those particular Areas of Operation.
For years, my email handle was brnelson. When that other Mrs. Nelson came aboard — in a 4th-grade classroom a few miles from me — more than a few of us were confused.
The newly minted Brooke R. Nelson’s school email was slightly different from mine — brnelson2. But do you think any of the parentals flooding the district’s online portals paid the slightest bit of attention to the nuanced numerical difference?
I started getting a lot — and by that, I mean a buttload — of electronic notes about the damnedest things.
Little Trevor forgot his lunch; should I drop it off at the office or just run it down to the classroom? Tiny Ashley blew a gasket last night trying to conjugate French verbs, so her homework would be late today.
