For some reason, the subject of education came up the other day amongst a conversation between myself and some friends. And with it…more disturbing gaps in my memory, specifically as it relates to my teachers in the past.

I can clearly remember my preschool and elementary school teachers. Once I get to junior high and high school, things start to get fuzzy, and when college comes around…the whole thing derails. It’s weird, because elementary school was over twenty years ago, whereas the rest of public school and college was more recent. I suppose it’s because I only had one teacher per grade in elementary school as opposed to one per subject later on, but it’s still a bit disconcerting that I’m having so much trouble remembering.

What’s my solution? I started putting together a text document listing all of my instructors grade by grade, subject by subject. The ones I can’t remember…well, I’ve dug out my old yearbooks in hopes a visual connection will fill in the holes. Of course, poring through these old books sent me into a depressive funk as those days were not happy times for me, but such is the price I must pay to restore my memory.

At the college level, I’ve got to have an unofficial transcript lying around here somewhere. If that fails, I’ll get a full one from my alma mater and go from there.

It’s ironic that I’m frantically trying to reconstruct this stuff, given how regretful I am about those time periods. Yes, I know it’s a very strange disconnect, and it would seem rather selfish of me to want to recall the positive stuff and erase the negative. But consider this: if there’s one thing I’d want to hold on to, it’s knowledge. Thus, it’s important to know where that knowledge came from, my personal feelings be damned.