Category: teachers

Mrs. Prezioso and Why I Loved Geometry

On April 28, 2025

Senator Elizabeth Warren is collecting stories from Americans: “If you have a favorite memory from public school, you could only go to school because you got financial aid, or you have any story that can remind people why we need to save these programs [of the Department of Education] share it now.” I shared an abbreviated version of my Tribute to Miss Brooks, and now I’m sharing with you my memories of another dear teacher: Mrs. Prezioso, my ninth grade geometry teacher. Senator Warren is reading some of the stories from the Senate floor, with the author’s permission. I invite you to send her your story.

On the first day of geometry class, Mrs. Prezioso gave each of us an index card and invited us to write on it our feelings and experiences with math. I wrote that I didn’t like it and sometimes feared it. No one was more shocked than I, when geometry quickly became my favorite class in ninth grade.

I loved solving geometric proofs. They totally fit my abstract-sequential way of processing information and my affinity for logic. I remember the time I stared forever at a proof we had for homework, and finally saw the solution. It took three steps. After someone asked about it the next day, Mrs. Prezioso took everyone through her solution, which took about 25 steps. I waited silently for her to finish. Then I revealed my vastly more efficient solution. Mrs. Prezioso and my classmates were amazed. That sealed my fate as the “best” geometry mind and the teacher’s pet.

I was definitely the teacher’s pet. It was mutual. But what I remember most about Mrs . Prezioso is the rapport she had with all of us. She told us that she felt so comfortable with us that she did things that she would not do with other classes. She read The Missing Piece, by Shel Silverstein, to us, because she had used it for an exam in her Master’s program. She brought in the film of her on the television show Candid Camera when she was little. In order to make it clearer for confused students, and then because we got a kick out of it, she would stand in the front of the room and say, “I’m an isosceles triangle,” while holding her arms at angles to her sides, and then turn around to demonstrate that it was the same on both sides.

Mrs. Prezioso also shared with us that her son, who was in graduate school to be a psychologist, thought she was crazy because she loved math. Hearing that inspired me to create a sign using my family’s Macintosh computer. I drew a picture of Mrs. Prezioso, and above that it said MISSING. Below the picture, I wrote, “ Escaped from the institution where she was committed by her family because of her love for math. Be careful. She is disguised as an isosceles triangle.” I taped it to the chalkboard in front of the room before she got there. She took a really long time to turn around, and all of us were snickering and trying very hard not to bust out in guffaws. When Mrs. Prezioso finally turned around, she read the sign and laughed. I don’t remember if we did any geometry for the rest of the class. I was too busy beaming. (See below for the actual sign, a little different from how I remembered it.)

I remained in close contact with Mrs. Prezioso for the next 27 years. The summer before we went to college, Mrs. Prezioso took three of us who had stayed in touch with her to lunch. I continued to have lunch with Mrs. Prezioso whenever I was in town. I always looked forward to seeing her and catching up. Even when we corresponded by email, it was very special to see her in person, especially the time I brought baby Ethan to meet her. By then I called her by her first name, Arlene.

Mrs. Prezioso had to retire because of health problems. Her family suspected that her breathing problems were due to her years of exposure to black mold in the school following the remodel, which happened long after I graduated.

It got increasingly difficult to get together, because Mrs. Prezioso suffered from emphysema for at least the last 15 years of her life. More than once she had to cancel our get together, because she wasn’t up to it. She was hospitalized and almost died three times. Her husband spent those years caring for her. We said he was a saint, because of the way he devoted himself to her care.

We kept in touch until her death in 2012, 27 years after I was in her class. As much as she meant to me, there was no way I could have known that she would also offer me a model for living with a degenerative, fatal illness. I have often thought of Mrs. Prezioso since receiving my ALS diagnosis.

I really didn’t understand how she could be too tired to get together. Or how it could take her three days to recover from attending a function. Or how she could be happy just having her husband push her in her wheelchair around the grocery store. Now I do.

On our second date, I told Barry that I was not looking for a caregiver. I meant it, but I got one nonetheless. With Barry, I got my own saint. And I do what I can to be grateful for the small things that bring me joy.

Mrs. Prezioso with me in 1993.

The sign, courtesy of Mr. Prezioso . Spelling was never my forte.

A Tribute to Miss Brooks

By Jessie

On January 23, 2025

In teachers

Mrs. Burns, my kindergarten teacher, clearly loved my best friend, while she did nothing to hide her disdain for me. One day she caught me sticking my tongue out at a classmate in response to an insult. Her idea of teaching me not to do that was to make me stand at her desk and stick my tongue out at her. If I had had thicker skin, I would have enjoyed it, but I cried in humiliation the whole time.

According to my mother, when I came home on the last day of kindergarten, I declared, “Mrs. Burns may know how to teach, but she doesn’t know how to be nice and she doesn’t know how to take care of children.” Then my eyes welled up and I said, “I wanted to like her.”

Intending to avoid another Mrs. Burns, my mother requested that I have Miss Brooks, who had a reputation as an excellent first grade teacher. The administration complied.

I loved Miss Brooks. She was warm and kind, everything Mrs. Burns wasn’t. Whenever we left the classroom, we walked in a single file line, as is the way of elementary students everywhere. Miss Brooks walked next to the line, and always stuck her hand out for the student next to her to hold. I felt special whenever she chose me.

Miss Brooks didn’t play favorites. There were some boys in our class who were a handful, but I don’t remember her treating them differently from the more compliant kids. Don’t get me wrong. Miss Brooks ran a tight ship. But she was never mean.

All of Miss Brooks’s students knew that she loved mice. She had mouse stuffed animals, mouse stickers, and other mice themed things at her desk. We liked knowing something personal about our teacher. We also knew that she was Irish, because she taught us an Irish jig.

I will never forget the time when I was in third grade, (a big kid), and I was walking by myself from one end of the campus back to the third grade building. Miss Brooks was walking ahead of me, without her class. She turned around, saw me, stopped, and stuck her hand out. I held her hand the whole way back and told her about my summer, feeling special the whole time.

The year I started fourth grade, Miss Brooks moved to Rhode Island to take a job as the principal of an elementary school. I wrote to her, and she always wrote back. One time I sent her a gold mouse pin that I got from the prize bin in my dentist’s office. The mouse wore a red dress. Obviously it couldn’t have been high quality having come from my dentist’s prize bin, but you wouldn’t know that from Miss Brooks’s response. She thanked me for the pin and told me that she wore it on her red turtleneck on the first day at her new school. After I read that, I had the biggest grin for hours.

Another time, my friend Alicia and I wrote letters to her and included some cat stickers. I remember that in her reply, Miss Brooks wrote that she would keep the cat stickers away from her “mouse ones.”

When I moved to Rhode Island for graduate school I thought I would look up Miss Brooks. I spent hours on the phone with the receptionist for the principals association. I only knew the year she became a principal. I didn’t know the name of her school. The receptionist could not find her. I figured she got married and changed her name. Or maybe she moved to a different state.

I was crushed. Still am. Maybe it’s because I became a teacher that I wanted so much to reconnect with Miss Brooks. To tell her how she made me feel, because over the years, it has brought me so much joy whenever my former students have told me that I had a positive effect on them.

When I think about Miss Brooks now, I recall a passage in Jewish liturgy about getting to the promised land. It states, “…there is no way to get from here to there, except by joining hands, marching together.”

To read an earlier post about Miss Brooks, click here.