One of the objects I’ve insisted on toting around between plenty of the states I’ve lived in and apartments I’ve rented since college is a small side table.
I’ve used it as a nightstand next to my bed, a bookshelf and a stand to place my houseplants next to the window.
It isn’t particularly pretty, but the edge of the tabletop does have a nice, routed edge, and the legs also have a little shelf for extra storage.
I recently sent an unrelated photo to my childhood best friend, Audrey, and she responded with a zoomed in screenshot of the barely visible corner of that side table.
Her message (in all caps) said: “Kayleen. Is that the table you made???”
Constructing this simple little table was no huge feat, but it did feel a little bit like it when Audrey and I made them in our eighth grade Industrial Arts class.
The table actually is pretty useful, but more importantly, it reminds me of how much I loved Mrs. Shaw’s class, and how much she taught us beyond just designing objects and using power tools.
Mrs. Shaw was our teacher at Faith Middle School in Fort Benning, Georgia.
Faith was not named for religious reasons, but for Medal of Honor recipient Lt. Col. Don C. Faith.
Our school mascot looked like a polar bear, but we were actually the “Warrior Bears.” This was necessary because two of the battalions Lt. Col. Faith was a part of were nicknamed the “Warriors” and the “Bears.”
It wasn’t a military school, but it definitely felt like a school on an Army post.
The school was split into four hallways, one each for sixth, seventh and eighth grade classes and the fourth for elective courses, which were each painted to match the appropriate students’ uniforms. Sixth graders wore a navy blue polo every day, seventh graders were in hunter green and eighth graders wore red.
There were two sets of teachers for every grade level, so students were assigned to a “team” of teachers for the year. Of course, the team names ranged from “Mastergunner” to “Airborne.”
Our cafeteria had a giant traffic stoplight in the front of the room that allegedly detected volume levels and changed color accordingly.
So, if us middle schoolers got too rowdy, it would be a “red light lunch,” meaning complete silence for the rest of the period. If you were caught even whispering, a lunch monitor would make you sit alone at a table next to the red light.
Throughout the school days at Faith, we could hear weapons being fired by soldiers participating in various training exercises.
One day, my eighth grade literature teacher paused her lesson to ask the class how we could stand hearing shooting all day.
I remember her question because it really dumbfounded me – who doesn’t hear gunfire all day outside of their middle school?
I think part of the reason we loved Mrs. Shaw so much is that she somehow understood how quirky our lives were as middle schoolers on a military post, even though she lived in Auburn, Alabama and commuted almost an hour to teach us every day.
She got that, in a place with lots of rules and a lifestyle we had very little control over, it was pretty cool to walk into a classroom where an adult trusted you – a mere 12-year-old – to use a bandsaw or pick up a hammer.
After Audrey and I chatted for a minute, she sent me another message that said “I wish she knew how much of an impact she had on me.”
Just like she did with the little side tables, Mrs. Shaw had a way of making every new accomplishment feel like a big deal.
A lot has changed since Faith, but keeping that silly table around always reminds me of my favorite teacher empowering us to believe we could do anything, and to keep believing it no matter how things do change.
-Kayleen Petrovia is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.