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cosmolinguistIt's getting to be the end of August, and I'm not starting school in the forseeable future. No thoughts of buying books, notebooks, pens, a day planner I swear I'm gonna use. This has never happened before in my memory.
I started school when I was three. The school I went to had preschool for "special education" kids, so there was preschool screening for the three- and four-year-olds. Except the obvious ones; I, as a kid who'd recently been totally blind and was still not seeing all that well, was an obvious one. So I did that for two years, and that's probably why I never saw Sesame Street until I was a babysitter. One of those years, my mom made cupcakes for me to hand out on my birthday (this could be done when there were only a dozen in my class), and my teachers sent me home with a thank-you note for her.
In kindergarten I got the role of narrator in the play we did for the next year's kindergarteners and their parents. This is because I could read. My dad has told me the story of how, after I read the little introductory bit, the teacher said to the parents of the new kids, "Now don't expect your children to be able to read this well"—a story that he, for obvious reasons, really likes and I, for equally obvious reasons, have always been embarrassed by. The only thing I remember about the play is that I got to sit on a chair that was on top of a table. They were our little-kid chairs and tables, sure, but I was thrilled. Two boys were supposed to take my hands to help me up and down from there, and it was awesome; I loved it.
First grade had the dreaded time tests, where we had to do a million addition or subtraction problems in a minute ... but that wasn't the worst of it, the worst was the bar graph on the wall that charted everyone's scores. I was hopeless at math, especially when I was being timed, and of course there was a little blonde girl who got them all right every single time. I also remember reading books like Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and getting so engrossed in it I didn't even notice when the next lesson had started, and I looked up as if I were in a daze and tried to figure out what was going on in the rest of the world.
My second-grade teacher was the first one I really liked. She did great things like take out a kid's very loose tooth with a Kleenex, while the rest of the class clustered around his desk and watched intently. When she heard someone hiccuping she'd make them come up to the front of the room, stand on their tiptoes, hold their arms out and close their eyes. She'd tell them it was very important for them not to laugh, and then tickle their armpits. Then she'd say, "Now hiccup for the class," and they never did. All this sounds stupid now, but it's enough to endear her in my memories.
I used to trade jokes with one of the third grade teachers, who was famous for knowing lots of the kind of jokes a third-grader would like. I tried out all my new knock-knock jokes on him, and great things like "What do you call a hippie's wife?" "Mississippi!" Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its sequels had a waiting list at the school library. A kid in my class was famous for eating glue whenever we did art projects, until he read the back of the glue bottle and found there were horses in it. He ate pencil shavings, too.
My fourth-grade social studies class got to the chapter on the Soviet Union about a week after the Soviet Union ceased to exist; I remember my teacher telling us that. I had the same teacher for fourth-grade that I'd had in kindergarten. The rumor was that she'd been moved to the older kids because she was too mean, which was probably not true, but could've been. She was a bit of a sports fan, and so we made little posters cheering on the Twins in the World Series, as we had when I was in kindergarten. The Twins have only won two World Series, and they happened the two years that I had that evil teacher.
I got suckered into being in the local spelling bee (for the second year in a row, but the first time I and some other girl had been nominated by our teacher and this time we had to do it ourselves). I got a morning off school to be in the spelling bee, where I failed to spell ... I think it was "forfeit" that year. (Yes, I remember all the words I couldn't spell at the four spelling bees I was in, and if you think that's crazy, you were probably never in a spelling bee.)
I dropped something in my sixth-grade classroom and bent over to pick it up, not noticing how close I was to the whiteboard, so I hit my head on the little ledge where the markers sit. I felt dumb and hoped no one had seen me. A minute later my head itched and I reached up to scratch it. My hand came away bloody, and I remember thinking Oh, I suppose I should go wash this off. A girl in my class—the one who's very pretty and popular but also manages to be a nice person—soon came in to the bathroom and helped me out. She went to get the nurse, who called my mom, who picked me up and took me to the doctor. That girl signed my yearbook in high school and always wrote something about how I should take care of my head. I suppose that was because it was the only interaction I had with her pretty, popular life, but it still seems less bitter than sweet when I think about it.
Seventh grade was the year I listened to pop music, so I can still spew off all kinds of details about the songs that were on the radio, even though I'll cringe when I hear most of them, because it wasn't a great tiem for popular music. Kurt Cobain died, but that was the first time I heard of him. Grunge was dying, too. Jewel and her ilk were replacing it, and I never thought that was a good trade. We learned the basics of playing guitar in music class that year, and I fell in love with it. My parents ended up buying me one for my birthday that year. It ended up defining a lot of my high-school life.
In eighth grade I had home ec first semester. I could already cook, but, having no friends, I was stuck with the group of mean boys, the sort that'd put salt in the cookie dough instead of sugar and you could never tell if they were stupid or just evil (though I'd vote for stupid, as there was a rule about eating whatever you cooked). I couldn't sew, and couldn't see the teacher's demonstrations at all, so I was atrocious at that. She was unsympathetic and gave me a D. The next semester we had shop. The other girls were scared of the jigsaw, but I was having a good time. I broke the band saw, which the teacher said no one had ever done before. I was proud.
Ninth grade is high school, back in the town where I went to elementary school and where my mom had a job. She used to eat lunch with a couple of my teachers, which was okay unless it was the one who told her when I wasn't doing enough homework for civics and economics that year.
In tenth grade I got an English teacher I liked. It was only because of him that I realized that English wasn't a bad subject, I'd just had bad teachers. He made us memorize a bunch of prepositions, he ranted and raved about Princess Diana, who'd died just before we started school, he was close to retirement so he wasn't afraid of doing anything bad, he made us all learn Mark Antony's funeral oration, he hated it when people said "good" when they meant "well", he read to us: The Iron Giant (before it was a movie), Of Mice and Men (which he did better than the movie; his voice for Lennie was famous), Bless the Beasts & Children, and other good stuff.
I took the ACT in eleventh grade. I didn't read most of the stories in the reading comprehension part, just looked at the questions and paged through the story to find answers. By the time I got to the last section, I'd been sitting in an uncomfortable desk for an entire morning, and I was so bored with it all that I barely looked at the graphs and numbers, just filled in circles. When we got our scores back, one of the kids in my class was showing off because he'd gotten the highest in our school, 29 (out of 36). My results, for some reason, got lost in the mail and didn't show up until a few weeks later. I'd forgotten all about the test--again--but was glad I got a 30 (of course, why else would I be telling this story?) so I could get the annoying kid to shut up.
I really enjoyed my senior year. And then I graduated. That was the best part of being in school: if you hang in there, you'll get out of there.
I was going to talk about college but I'm worn out, so maybe I'll do that later.
I started school when I was three. The school I went to had preschool for "special education" kids, so there was preschool screening for the three- and four-year-olds. Except the obvious ones; I, as a kid who'd recently been totally blind and was still not seeing all that well, was an obvious one. So I did that for two years, and that's probably why I never saw Sesame Street until I was a babysitter. One of those years, my mom made cupcakes for me to hand out on my birthday (this could be done when there were only a dozen in my class), and my teachers sent me home with a thank-you note for her.
In kindergarten I got the role of narrator in the play we did for the next year's kindergarteners and their parents. This is because I could read. My dad has told me the story of how, after I read the little introductory bit, the teacher said to the parents of the new kids, "Now don't expect your children to be able to read this well"—a story that he, for obvious reasons, really likes and I, for equally obvious reasons, have always been embarrassed by. The only thing I remember about the play is that I got to sit on a chair that was on top of a table. They were our little-kid chairs and tables, sure, but I was thrilled. Two boys were supposed to take my hands to help me up and down from there, and it was awesome; I loved it.
First grade had the dreaded time tests, where we had to do a million addition or subtraction problems in a minute ... but that wasn't the worst of it, the worst was the bar graph on the wall that charted everyone's scores. I was hopeless at math, especially when I was being timed, and of course there was a little blonde girl who got them all right every single time. I also remember reading books like Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and getting so engrossed in it I didn't even notice when the next lesson had started, and I looked up as if I were in a daze and tried to figure out what was going on in the rest of the world.
My second-grade teacher was the first one I really liked. She did great things like take out a kid's very loose tooth with a Kleenex, while the rest of the class clustered around his desk and watched intently. When she heard someone hiccuping she'd make them come up to the front of the room, stand on their tiptoes, hold their arms out and close their eyes. She'd tell them it was very important for them not to laugh, and then tickle their armpits. Then she'd say, "Now hiccup for the class," and they never did. All this sounds stupid now, but it's enough to endear her in my memories.
I used to trade jokes with one of the third grade teachers, who was famous for knowing lots of the kind of jokes a third-grader would like. I tried out all my new knock-knock jokes on him, and great things like "What do you call a hippie's wife?" "Mississippi!" Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its sequels had a waiting list at the school library. A kid in my class was famous for eating glue whenever we did art projects, until he read the back of the glue bottle and found there were horses in it. He ate pencil shavings, too.
My fourth-grade social studies class got to the chapter on the Soviet Union about a week after the Soviet Union ceased to exist; I remember my teacher telling us that. I had the same teacher for fourth-grade that I'd had in kindergarten. The rumor was that she'd been moved to the older kids because she was too mean, which was probably not true, but could've been. She was a bit of a sports fan, and so we made little posters cheering on the Twins in the World Series, as we had when I was in kindergarten. The Twins have only won two World Series, and they happened the two years that I had that evil teacher.
I got suckered into being in the local spelling bee (for the second year in a row, but the first time I and some other girl had been nominated by our teacher and this time we had to do it ourselves). I got a morning off school to be in the spelling bee, where I failed to spell ... I think it was "forfeit" that year. (Yes, I remember all the words I couldn't spell at the four spelling bees I was in, and if you think that's crazy, you were probably never in a spelling bee.)
I dropped something in my sixth-grade classroom and bent over to pick it up, not noticing how close I was to the whiteboard, so I hit my head on the little ledge where the markers sit. I felt dumb and hoped no one had seen me. A minute later my head itched and I reached up to scratch it. My hand came away bloody, and I remember thinking Oh, I suppose I should go wash this off. A girl in my class—the one who's very pretty and popular but also manages to be a nice person—soon came in to the bathroom and helped me out. She went to get the nurse, who called my mom, who picked me up and took me to the doctor. That girl signed my yearbook in high school and always wrote something about how I should take care of my head. I suppose that was because it was the only interaction I had with her pretty, popular life, but it still seems less bitter than sweet when I think about it.
Seventh grade was the year I listened to pop music, so I can still spew off all kinds of details about the songs that were on the radio, even though I'll cringe when I hear most of them, because it wasn't a great tiem for popular music. Kurt Cobain died, but that was the first time I heard of him. Grunge was dying, too. Jewel and her ilk were replacing it, and I never thought that was a good trade. We learned the basics of playing guitar in music class that year, and I fell in love with it. My parents ended up buying me one for my birthday that year. It ended up defining a lot of my high-school life.
In eighth grade I had home ec first semester. I could already cook, but, having no friends, I was stuck with the group of mean boys, the sort that'd put salt in the cookie dough instead of sugar and you could never tell if they were stupid or just evil (though I'd vote for stupid, as there was a rule about eating whatever you cooked). I couldn't sew, and couldn't see the teacher's demonstrations at all, so I was atrocious at that. She was unsympathetic and gave me a D. The next semester we had shop. The other girls were scared of the jigsaw, but I was having a good time. I broke the band saw, which the teacher said no one had ever done before. I was proud.
Ninth grade is high school, back in the town where I went to elementary school and where my mom had a job. She used to eat lunch with a couple of my teachers, which was okay unless it was the one who told her when I wasn't doing enough homework for civics and economics that year.
In tenth grade I got an English teacher I liked. It was only because of him that I realized that English wasn't a bad subject, I'd just had bad teachers. He made us memorize a bunch of prepositions, he ranted and raved about Princess Diana, who'd died just before we started school, he was close to retirement so he wasn't afraid of doing anything bad, he made us all learn Mark Antony's funeral oration, he hated it when people said "good" when they meant "well", he read to us: The Iron Giant (before it was a movie), Of Mice and Men (which he did better than the movie; his voice for Lennie was famous), Bless the Beasts & Children, and other good stuff.
I took the ACT in eleventh grade. I didn't read most of the stories in the reading comprehension part, just looked at the questions and paged through the story to find answers. By the time I got to the last section, I'd been sitting in an uncomfortable desk for an entire morning, and I was so bored with it all that I barely looked at the graphs and numbers, just filled in circles. When we got our scores back, one of the kids in my class was showing off because he'd gotten the highest in our school, 29 (out of 36). My results, for some reason, got lost in the mail and didn't show up until a few weeks later. I'd forgotten all about the test--again--but was glad I got a 30 (of course, why else would I be telling this story?) so I could get the annoying kid to shut up.
I really enjoyed my senior year. And then I graduated. That was the best part of being in school: if you hang in there, you'll get out of there.
I was going to talk about college but I'm worn out, so maybe I'll do that later.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 07:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 10:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 11:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:12 am (UTC)I'll limit it to one at the moment however. Wasn't Yeltsins coup of the USSR in the summer? I have memories of going camping for a week, and returning to find Gorbechev no longer in power.
Perhaps you were thinking of the Berlin Wall?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:38 am (UTC)England does have a habit of distracting people from University, it seems.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 12:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 01:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:32 am (UTC)I really liked your story about the ACT. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 08:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 11:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-23 10:00 am (UTC)Well, yes, that's probably true, but I didn't want to mention that. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-23 10:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-23 08:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-23 10:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-30 03:04 pm (UTC)So, I think he died when you were in 6th grade, not 7th.
All technicality aside, I really liked reading this entry -- probably because I love school and am a huge dork. It makes me want to write a similar one myself. :)