Here is everything I remember about elementary school.

There were large murals covering three of the four walls of the lunchroom, painted over (already thickly painted) white cement blocks. Each was predominantly blue and green and depicted some kind of bucolic, loosely Tennesseean or Appalachian scene (log cabins, deer, bears), and I thought they were astoundingly beautiful. Once, while standing in the lunchline with Brian Winbigler in frnot of me, I smelled an overwhelmingly pungent odor of burnt chicken nuggets and blacked out. Around the same time, a child in my class referred to an oddly-folded hamburger bun as "a booty" and many children laughed. There was a large traffic light above the lunchroom cash register which was used to control the volume level of the room. It was kept generally at green. When the yellow light was turned on, it served essentially as a warning that the red light was approaching. The red light indicated that there was to be silence. This was the situation when a student teacher, who I now realize was probably very young, chided me in front of an entire circular plywood table of my closest pals. My mother addressed a strongly worded letter to this cafeteria monitor after I complained that she lambasted me simply for coughing during quiet time. This was a lie, but to be fair, the woman had a terrible attitude. I also remember going to school early, before it was even light out, and watching television in the cafeteria - most notably Gumby.

Outside of the cafeteria and to the left was a room devoted entirely to the washing of hands. It was a semi-circular room with beige tile halfway up (which was above our heads) and white plaster beyond that. It was outfitted with a large, round basin of burnished steel that half a classroom of children could fit comfortably around and operate its water-sprinklers with the foot pedal encircling it. The room smelled of liquid soap and brown paper towels.

The music room was covered with posters, one for each type of orchestral instrument -- Brass and Percussion are the only ones I can remember the look of with any clarity. In music class, Brian Winbigler and I sat in the two seats farthest back and to the left and giggled hysterically and incessantly at our own private joke, which was simply this: We would sing the wrong song. As the class sang "Don Gato," we would do "Kookaburra". For "Chickary Chick," we would sing "Old John Muddlecomb," etc. I don't recall Ms. Pam Gildrey ever getting us in trouble for it, just the feverish hilarity of how horrible we sounded.

Amanda Satterfield once roped me into a scheme wherein I mimed playing the drums and she lipsynced to "Barbara Ann." I was very bored with and somewhat annoyed by this, but did it because she was my best friend, and I her only friend. At the beginning of fifth grade, Mrs. Gildrey asked the class what kind of music we liked, venturing as a guess New Kids on the Block. Malia Wallace retorted "MC Hammer!" in a booming voice. Her manner suggested that this was a shocking, street thing to say, and she pitched her body forward in her chair and made a dramatic gesture with her fist. Someone else volunteered "Vanilla Ice." A real shift in the zeitgeist.

I have a brief flash of a memory involving standing in line for music class, outside against a sunbleached brick wall at the front end of the school with Leslie Rowland and Elizabeth Zelasko.

Once or twice, we went one by one to a back room to have alone time with a small, black autoharp.

We did a musical in maybe third or fourth grade that was to do with American Music, and Lelia was tagged to portray the titular character from the traditional song "Billy Boy." I suppose she didn't do it well enough, because she was replaced by some smaller, brunette child of indeterminate gender. I remember looking over at Lelia standing beside me in the chorus (singing "Billy Boy") and seeing a long tear streak down her face, but there is some confusion about this in my memory owing to the fact that she also had a long, pale scar down one cheek, directly under and perpendicular to her left eye. Lelia, once we were in middle school, became my best and most longterm girlfriend, but at this point I knew her only as the girl with the shortest hair.

The musical also included the song "Buffalo Gals," and several girls including Natalie Fielden dressed up as Buffalo and danced around a boy. It kills me that I can't remember specifics about any other songs from this, though I am confident that "She'll Be Comin' Round The Mountain" and "Home on the Range" were included. (Our imaginations are so intense as kids. During "Home on the Range" the gym might as well have been a desert covered in shadowy cacti and pinkish orange sunset, and that's the way I remember it actually looking during the performance.)

I think I was in second grade when I met Drew Schneider at a school assembly in the gym. These types of events were the only times we got to really interact with kids from other classrooms. Everyone was sitting Indian style, which was a recently-learned thing, on the floor of the gym, and it was as if there was just suddenly a ghostly head hovering in front of my head. There was something really interesting about what he looked like, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Very serene. Very blue eyes and blonde, almost white hair, blue shirt, blue jeans, white shoes, sitting differently from everyone else, i.e. kneeling. "What's your name?" I said. "Drew." "That's my brother's name," I said. I never had any other interaction with him in my life. This is probably one of my clearest memories from childhood.

In fourth grade, Cody smelled like oatmeal and pee. In fifth, Johnny smelled simply of pee. Later, the halls of our middle school would ring with rumors of his masturbating in one of the study hall's private corrals. It was one of those incredibly pervasive, life-ruining rumors.

On the drive home from school, Mom used to buy two dollars worth of unleaded gas at the Amoco at the top of Best Street. They kept plastic Double Bubble gallon containers worth of gum and Dum-Dums on top of the gas pumps for kids to rummage around in.

These are nice. I remember an outdoor amphitheater where after lunch, we could eat our ice cream, purchased for 50 cents. I always choose the blended vanilla and chocolate in a plastic cup, with a little wooden spoon. I remember days when I didn't have 50 cents for ice cream.

I remember these little ice creams, and the little wooden spoons. They had a cardboard lid with a tab.

I remember Nutty Buddies being 30 cents.

In 1st and 2nd grade, we didn't have a cafeteria. Instead, at lunchtime a metal cart with all the food was wheeled into each classroom, and our teachers served lunch to the kids who had ordered the hot lunch.

I started elementary school in 1st grade, instead of kindergarten. On my first day of school one of the girls on the bus directs me to the wing with the kindergarten classrooms, and I get all confused. Nearly 25 years later, her eldest brother hits on me at a Halloween party.

If any parent requested a teacher for a child the elementary principal would purposely place the child with another teacher. However, my 2nd grade teacher requested me.

Every Friday, I got a Hot Dog with tomato sauce and a can of Halls Sno-Top from the canteen at lunch. Then got to kick back that afternoon but they usually held a school assembly which slowly degenerated into a weekly variety show including intermittent performances from yours truly as a ten-year-old with a stand up act that in retrospect had some rather dadaist influences.

Youtube?!

sitting Indian style

I have not heard this phrase since elementary school - how apropos!

My grade school crush was Eric Sack. 10, 15 years later was chatting with my friend Brian (who grew up in another state, mind you) and mentioned where I grew up.

"Oh I went to high school with someone from your town. Did you know Eric Sack?"
"Oh, I had such a crush on him."
"Me too!!!"

Thankfully, mobile phones with video capture were not around in the mid-90s. (xpost)

2nd grade discussion topic: is Santa Claus real?

The year that our teacher decided to experiment by giving us "fake money" to use in order to teach us capitalism or something. And then when he angrily pulled the plug on all this because the poorest kid (in real life) in the class had managed to wheel and deal his way to being the richest kid (in fake money) in the class, and the teacher refused to believe it but had no proof that he stole or anything like that.

The time our school decided to run a "breakfast bar" in the mornings giving away free toast because some students came from poorer backgrounds, which caused a STATEWIDE SCANDAL and our school principal was on television for a week. Then the christian charities turned up saying that this was the beginning of the end for our decent society and it should be shut down, presumably leaving those poor kids hungry.

Wow!

My Year 3 teacher who was EXACTLY like the teacher from Calvin & Hobbes. She also had the crazy scheme of making you sit for a "license" before you could graduate from writing with a pencil to writing with a pen.

My nickname in Year 1 was "Go Go Fast Run".

The glorious summer when the Year 5 Cricket team won the local district competition, helped in part by my pace bowling and in part by some classy green caps.

The ongoing rumour that one of the Year 6 teachers liked to look at young boys in various states of undress and the concern that followed when he put his hand up to coach one of the school football teams.

Mrs. McGAYHAY

An abbreviated personal history of Z S' elementary years, poopoo and peepee episode

K - got pooped on during class
1 - Stepped into horror show bathroom where all the boys were trying to pee on the ceiling at the same time
2 - There were hooks in the bathroom, presumably for coats or whatever. I had a shirt I used to where that had a hook on the back of it for some reason. Some fat kid whose name was actually Billy Bob hung me up by the hook on the...er...hook. The next kid who came in ran to get the teacher, but while the teacher was on her way another kid came in and peed as I watched from up on the wall
3 - There is a sudden, gradewide, realization that Charl13 C4rl3ton is lowering his pants and underwear ALL THE WAY TO THE FLOOR everytime he pees
4 - My friend Chuck is running a race, runs into the back of someone on accident, and simultaneously shits his pants. Years later, he clarifies that it was diarrhea
5 - Have still never taken a shit at school

Shit at work? A++++==

no, that's in 5th grade, see. I could continue my poopoo and peepee history up to the present and give more details about my breakthrough public doodoo, but I'll hold off for now

3 - There is a sudden, gradewide, realization that Charl13 C4rl3ton is lowering his pants and underwear ALL THE WAY TO THE FLOOR everytime he pees

^^^I died.

a kid called p4ul mc4l33r in my class did the same thing. Stood at the urinal and lowered his pants and trousers to pee while everyone else did it through their thighs. He was born very premature but wasn't mentally impaired and later studied physics at university.

through their flys even, jesus, weird Freudian slip.

flies even maybe. Fuck sake Kopperberg, what have you wrought.

I was all like, peed through their thighs? Fuck kind of school was that?

this is an amazing and wonderful thread.

i remember:
-in kindergarten i asked the teacher how to spell "ing" becaue we were writing in our journals (about "cluody with a chance of meatballs" iirc) and i thought it was a separate word that you put after other words to indicate something i wasn't sure about. "cooking" "reading" "watching." but! the teacher made me promise to never forget, and so i remember it.
-in second grade i thought i was cool cuz i was into robin hood and myths and legends and shit. i remember liking that we did brainteasers and simple puzzles at the start of every day.
-third grade i remember getting really upset learning about AIDS via the "weekly reader" pamphlet distributed in schools to promote uh, reading the newspaper or something. but i got really upset. because i couldn't realyl wrap my head around it, and it made me sad. :((( i really liked our school librarian and i read this cool sci-fi young adult book called "journey to the mushroom planet" and i remember loving it so hardcore.
-fourth grade was okay i guess. i think at this point i was reading a lot of Three Investigators brand mysteries and also dragonlance novels. i was nerdy but i had a few friends i guess. most afternoons i would go home from school and watch tv--the disney afternoon, star trek the next generation, the fresh prince, saved by the bell... that kind of stuff. that really spans most of elementary school iirc.
-fifth grade we read a super abridged version of hamlet. also we read Bridge To Terabithia... and that made me really upset too. i think this was when i began developing a reputation as a weirdo & sissy. i was into magic cards and cheezy fantasy novels. i remember after school hanging out with my friends nick & gabe at their grandmother's house which was down the street from the school. we built crazy lego castles & towns, played magic cards, ate hot pockets and drank sprite.

heh, cool stories, ian.

In primary 3 the teacher and I would play Pac Man on a Friday afternoon to see who got the better score. Everyone else in the class sat in a huddle and cheered me on. She always beat me but I was usually pretty close. She was the only adult I'd ever met who could play computer games.

oh, school lunch. yeah. chicken patties. weird canned yam things that no one touched.

when bagged, kids trading things. the weird things that were "cool" like kool aid bursts or wahtever they were called. soggy sandwiches.

My teacher in Primary 1 was a horrible woman of Polish decent who really hated me, possibly because she was racist (my dad said she was weird with him too). In Primary 2 i had a normal nice teacher and thought she was the best thing ever.

I also spoke very properly when I started at school because my dad spoke English as a second language and had learned it off of a posh English woman and my mother was working-class but hung with upper class people from the age of about 12 until university and has always affected a less strong accent. I realised I was going to get bullied speaking the way I did at school and gradually changed my cannots to cannaes and my am not to urnaes.

I love ian's story about "ing"!

when i was turning eight all i wanted more than anything was a super nintendo for my birthday. whenever my mom or dad would ask me what i wanted though, i would say banana peels since they already knew the one thing i wanted. the morning of my birthday i woke and went downstairs and my parents were in the dining room, usually they would have already left for work. they told me they wanted me to open my present now which was weird but i was really excited. it was exactly the right size and shape. but inside was a banana peel and clue which led to another box with a peel, hidden in the kitchen, and another note. after about an hour - my dad had even weighted a box and dropped it in the pool - i finally found the last box, which had a super nintendo.

oh wait - thats not really about school - ummmm

when i was in first grade i was the tallest boy in my class but the tallest person was a girl. everyone in my year remembered this for a really long time

when i was in third grade our teacher would read aloud stories we had written to the class w/o correcting any of the grammar or spelling mistakes. in one of my stories i wrote $500 with the sign but w/o writing "dollars" and when the teacher read it out he would just say "jill and mark wanted to buy the shoes but they could not afford five hundred" and i was so angry everyone was laughing i shouted that sign means dollars and had to try really hard not to cry

later that year i broke my leg right before summer vacation and i lost one of my crutches somehow and the same teacher made me write "I will not lose my crutches" over and over as punishment

teacher sounds like a mean dummy imo

Seconded.

teachers sounds like a grade a cunt tbh

Was sent to headmasters office for arm-wrestling during nativity play rehearsal. I argued that I was going on holiday to South America so wouldn't even be there to play Owner of Third Inn anyway. He chewed me out for about ten minutes anyway. When I was on holiday Scotland had its worst weather of my lifetime and later the headmaster had a nervous breakdown.

i.e. go me

haha

when i was in maybe fifth grade we had a school assembly where ppl put on a play about not talking to strangers. at one point a creepy dude in a trench coat exposes himself to a young girl (his back is to the audience, im assuming the dude was wearing shorts) and asks her to touch him. during the pause where the girl was acting shocked and scared i yelled out "touch it!" as loud as i could

when i was in fourth grade our teacher would have ppl's parents come in and spend some time in the morning talking to our class about what they did. my mom came in and gave a really boring and probably too sophisticated talk about medicine and how kid's brains develop and learn things and everyone was like your mom is boring. but it was forgotten because the next week my friend matthew's dad came in and grossed us out by showing tonnes of pictures of cavities and rotten teeth and lecturing us not to drink soda

6 years old fell off my bike going too fast down a road with a car behind me (turns out the car driver was my mum looking for me because i was out too late, lol), after the six stitches in my chin by the German Doctor with the most euphonious German accent ever I was worried people at school would laugh at my stitches. Turns out they all wanted to "feel my spider". Made me cool for a fortnight.

fourth grade teacher also instituted a policy of having us bring in a book we'd been reading and letting a few ppl read aloud from their books to the class each day. she also let us read/perform stories we'd made up ourselves and i became really competitive with a girl that was a child actor - we were typically the only two that would volunteer to read on a regular basis. eventually we collaborated on a play about unruly orphans and brought down the house enacting a food fight the two start.

did u love her or what

i sort of went to 3 different elementary schools. i was home-schooled up to 3rd grade, then went to public school in a rural finger lakes town, except for half of 4th grade we moved to england (small town called lyndhurst, in hampshire) -- which was only about 5 months of schooling, but i remember it vividly because everything was so different. anyway, i have so many clear memories from those years that i could write a book that would bore everyone. but one funny thing is this: my 3rd-grade teacher was ms. bailey, who was unmarried and i suppose fairly young (late 20s or early 30s), although of course she seemed old to me. but so anyway, somehow a rumor got started among the kids that she had something going on with mr. simon, the avuncular (and definitely married) school janitor. i have no idea how this notion spread, but it did, to the extent that we used to chant the whole "ms. bailey and mr. simon, sittin' in a tree..." mostly i think we thought the idea of either ms. bailey or mr. simon ever kissing anyone was sort of gross and hilarious.

but anyway, several years after i graduated from the school and we'd moved away to a different town, my mom heard through a friend of hers who was still there that ms. bailey had been forced to leave the school after it was discovered that she had been carrying on a long-term affair with mr. simon. and, i mean, this was probably 6 to 8 years after i'd been in her class. i was really shocked to find out that we'd been right about the whole thing, and it made me wonder where that information had come from and how we'd all latched onto it. kids know stuff, i guess is the lesson there.

we got football (soccer) practice on a Tuesday evening by the janitor MrL3Blond3. Known by everyone as Mr L. Mr L. was way cooler than a teacher but still an authority figure. A few years later at high school Mr. L. started working as a janitor there. He looked a lot older than his years and didn't really remember us from Primary school, despite the fact that the high school was very large and only a few of us had gone to the primary school he worked in. He remembered me, but it was mainly because of my height, gawkiness, and foreign surname. We were all quite a bit disillusioned about it.

In third grade somebody crapped in the urinal in the boys bathroom a couple of times. Nobody knew the word "urinal" but somebody called it the "pee pot" so the mystery of the "foozer in the pee pot" was the major intrigue for a couple of months.

In fourth grade(?) a guy in my class got all mad at his older sister and got a bunch of people to gather around him on what everyone called The Big Rock on the playground and read from a home-made newspaper that he had made detailing all the bad things about his sister. The only one I remember was him yelling town-crier style how "JODY HAS A HAIRY VEEVEE".

looooool

kindergarten: my teacher thought it would be a fun idea for us to make sculptures out of vegetables with the help of our parents. my mom bought a squash because she wanted me to make bert from sesame street. i adamantly refused to take part in the project, so i was the only kid who showed up to class that day without a vegetable sculpture. it's not the first arbitrarily persnickety thing i did in elementary school - i also refused to write back to my 6th grade penpal.

1st: i wrote a story and my teacher had me read it out loud to my class. i don't remember the plot of the story - it might have been loosely based on a TMNT episode - but i definitely remember using the word "thusly" in it, which i picked up from a garfield strip. my teacher was so impressed that she had me read it to the principal in his office. he gave me a pin as a reward.

2nd: half an hour of each day is segmented out to a reading corner, where the teacher has a group of students read aloud from a book in the corner of the classroom while everyone else does some other kind of work. my stomach hurts but i'm trying my damnedest to keep cool when all of a sudden, i let out a gigantic fart in front of everyone. everyone laughs, i start crying, the teacher gets annoyed but doesn't say anything, just expects me to keep reading. this same teacher yelled at me for tying my shoelaces at my desk, or as she put it, "fiddling with my shoes". many years later, she was (sort of) profiled in a daily show segment about a group of senior citizens on a bus ride to atlantic city, so i was pretty ok with people laughing at her on national television.

3rd: my teacher begins to realize that the same spelling tests she gives to everyone else are not enough of a challenge for me, so she has me pick 20 words from the dictionary each week - all beginning with the same letter, which changed every week - and i had the smartest girl in the class read me the words in a separate part of the room while everyone else took the regular test. the only words i remember giving myself to spell were "staphylococcus" and "jurisprudence".

4th: i blocked most of this year out of my head because it was absolutely terrible, i came home in tears practically every day for about a month because i was made to sit in a desk cluster with three other kids who made constantly teased me and had me do all their work for them. this is also one of my more creative years, iirc - i wrote a lot of humorous stories, including a "job requirements" for the recess chaperones. one extract from that went something like: "if a student runs up to you and cries about getting hit by a dodgeball thrown at him by another student, you must bench that kid for being a crybaby".

5th: i was really obsessed with IQ tests at age 11, and i copied - verbatim - a 50-question IQ test from this large book that i had on white paper with pencil. i gave it to my fifth grade teacher to see if he'd be curious to take it. he went one step further - made copies for everyone in the class and devoted an hour to having everyone do it. i remember someone asking my teacher what the word "vex" meant and him not knowing. at lunch that day, someone threw a dodgeball at me out of spite.

6th grade: this girl christine and i take turns drawing crude illustrations of bugs getting squashed, and we captioned each illustration with something obscene like "this bug is fucked up!" we passed the drawings around to some of the kids in the class because we thought it was hysterical. it eventually landed in the hands of the antisocial class bully who, probably sensing an opportunity to make someone else look bad for a change, promptly handed it over to our teacher. neither christine nor i were allowed to attend the 6th grade submarine sandwich party, and we both had to eat lunch in the principal's office for a week. i was also forced to tell my parents about it, but was so scared to that i never brought it up. she eventually found out when my teacher called her, and i was grounded for the first - and last - time ever.

I remember having to take my singing test. I started singing and everyone, including the teacher, started laughing. I still got a C. Probably for courage, cause singing was obviously not my forte.

That reminds me... age 9 or 10, my two best friends are trying out for the choir, so I reluctantly go too. We are to sing a hymn of our choice solo in front of everyone else trying out from our year while the music teacher accompanies on piano. At least twice she says "oh, you do have a low voice, don't you" and starts playing lower while I carry on regardless. I only realise years later this means I must've been really fucking out of tune. I still got in the choir, presumably because it would've been unfair to exclude one kid.

Weirdly none of the other kids said anything, not even the bitchy girls from the other class who'd come up to me after the school play the year before and said, "you have the best costume [I was a kangaroo in a musical play about Captain Cook; all the other kangaroos were wearing brown t-shirts and brown gloves, but my mother had sewn together a real costume out of brown fluffy material] but you CAN'T DANCE." I was bummed out about this for some time, because (in traditional bitch-nerd dynamic that I probably still haven't grown out of to this day) I'd thought they were, like, really cool until they were mean to me.

How was lunch with the principal?

i went to 5 different elementary schools. one of them had a planetarium in it.

+ swimming pool and 2 gyms

Was it a private school?

it was public!

It was in Watertown, NY.

Only went to fourth grade there, but moving down to SC in 5th grade was such a letdown.

A brief history of me and swearwords:
- Aged 7, we go to a schools' day out with the other primary schools from the area. I hear some other kids saying "shit" and I think this is really weird because I thought it was a special slang word that only existed at my school (parents never swear and I must not have heard it on TV).

- At about the same age, I am unaware that "fuck" is a rude word too, though I must've picked it up from somewhere, because I draw a cartoon where someone says "oh fuckaroonie" and am proud but bemused by the epic roffling this word causes among my friends, and don't understand why they're worried that the headmistress might've heard when she walks past soon afterwards.

- Aged 8 I move to a new school, and even though "shit" is the coolest word at my old school and I've learnt that saying "fuck" causes hysterical laughter I am shocked to hear the new kids say "damn" and "bloody", because those are words my mother has told me I should never say, and she's never mentioned the other two at all.

-- during my half-year in england, when i was 10, i was shocked when once a week there was a religious assembly where the headmaster led everybody in singing hymns and everybody recited the lord's prayer. this violated everything i knew about the proper place of religion (i.e. NOT in school) and also made me feel very weird, with my parents being buddhist and all. i remember my teacher, during a class discussion when i was new to the school, noting that i wasn't christian. he said it sort of approvingly, like it was important to recognize that there were different religions, but the reaction of a few kids in the class was just visceral and astonished. i felt like an exotic animal put on display -- which i already felt like anyway, being the only american in school and the only american a lot of these kids had ever met. i sort of liked the attention, but the religion stuff really weirded me out.

-- also in england: sitting at my desk, beginning the day of classes, and realizing that the blackboard says "4 July." "hey," i said to simon, the kid who sat next to me, "it's the 4th of july." simon: "so?" me: "well, you know. that's a holiday. it started america. the day we declared independence from you guys!" him, sighing: "stop bragging."

Did your school not have summer holidays? School in July is harsh.

Pretty much the only thing I remember about primary one was my first day, when I got stung on the knee by a wasp and cried for the rest of the day.

yeah that would've been near the end of the year. there was a 6-week break from mid-july through august.

(and then by september i was back in american 5th-grade classroom, experiencing cultural whiplash all over again.)

I remember sitting on the bench in class, with a gigantic motherfucking migraine attack, saying to my friend:"I think I am going to barf." I can't remember if I actually did or not.

When I was six I stole a bit of chalk from the classroom and wrote FUCK on the side of the hut our classroom was in, exactly where we lined up after lunch and break to go back into class. When we queued up at the end of lunch a cry of about 30 voices in unison rose up "Ohaaaaaaaaah!" (for some reason this was the stock sound to make when someone had done something naughty) our very nice teachers Mrs Morris asked who had done it and one of my friends said "Jamie did it". Thanks, pal. Had to sit out outside the headmaster's office the rest of the day, he gave me a short lecture that was a lot less scary than what I had been anticipating. I didn't know what the word fuck meant and I think I just did it to be transgressive. Edgy! At parents night that year my teacher told my dad, noting that it was most out of character and that at least I'd spelled it properly. I think I might have told this anecdote on ilx already.

Haha, I attended seven different schools from 1st to 6th grade:

1st grade at Ft. Lee, Va.
2nd grade started in Perry, Ohio
2nd grade completed in Darmstadt, Germany
3rd & 4th grade in Darmstadt, at a different school from 2nd grade
5th grade started in Darmstadt
5th grade completed at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo.
6th grade at a different school in Ft. Leonard Wood.

I couldn't even begin to put together a comprehensive picture of everything I remember about elementary school!

in 4th grade I got busted for calling some girl a bitch in the lunchroom. sent to the principal's office where sister rosemary washed my mouth out w/soap. aggressively. she rubbed the bar of soap on my tongue and I tasted/gagged on it all afternoon until I finally puked in a water fountain.

in 3rd grade I read a bunch of these "lives of the saints" books in the school library. there was one about the holocaust. well, kinda, it was the story of this catholic priest in a concentration camp who was starved to death by the nazis in a hunger pit. he led the other prisoners in hymns while they were dying, defying the nazis. can't remember if there was any mention of jews maybe he converted them! title was "Music From The Hunger Pit" scary stuff.

How was lunch with the principal?

― kid cruti (roxymuzak), Sunday, 26 July 2009 10:37 (Yesterday) Permalink

mostly silent and awkward. he only opened his mouth to berate us further iirc

i checked a book called "humorous tales for children" out of the library at least three times, probably four. i was the first person to do so since the 1970s.

In Year 2, my teacher was Mrs. Rodriguez. My grandmother was concerned that I was possibly being taught by a Mexican.

Also, in Year 2, we created our own snowboards from empty cardboard boxes. Unfortunately, this being Adelaide, we never got to actually use them in the snow (in retrospect, having been overseas and spending a winter in the snow, it probably was for the best) but won an art prize from our teacher.

I remember reading 'Island of The Blue Dolphins.' I think it was in the 4th grade. This book started my love reading and literature. I remember sitting in glass and daydreaming all day about the island and the girl who was left behind.

my fifth grade teacher told me I had two settings: 'loud' and 'off'

my fourth grade gifted teacher pulled me aside and told me "you have a disease, but it's okay, it's not contagious. it's called ADD."

my third grade teacher cried at a parent-teacher conference because she "didn't know where she had gone wrong with me"

In Year 4, they thought I had the ADD and put me on Ritalin for two weeks. Nothing happened but I did get into a fight, therefore the experiment was deemed unsuccessful.

i was made fun of & often ignored because i was "chubby" so i played horseshoe at recess

In Year 6, I got drawn to sit next to Rebecca Menzies for most of the year, *swoon*.

ooo i sat next to Eli Alonzo who wouldnt stop chewing on the collar of his leather
jacket *surprisingly swoon*

I used to check out Bulfinch's Mythology from the school's library all the time. The original reason for this was that I was wild about Pyramus and Thisbe, this owing entirely to a memorable retelling of it by my eldest sister, Kelly. She sat with her legs curled under her on the couch and rattled the whole thing off, ending the story with the bit explaining why mulberry trees are red, which was the real hook for me. (I was wild about Kelly, too. At that time I thought she was the most glamorous thing alive. She had all these interesting things and a way of talking to a kid like they were a person; the combination was devastating to an eight-year-old. I remember making her a card that featured a poem called "My Star" that I selected out of some giant, red, gilt-edged tome kept in the wooden secretary and a crayola-ed image of a black haired woman wearing a red dress and holding a cigarette holder. I think I was just trying to show a glamorous, sophisticated woman, because that's what I thought Kelly was. Like I said, I was wild about her.) It was a paperback that had been made into a hardback, and it was about 500 pages long with a typical library pocket pasted in the back of its cover, the card inside filled with my name over and over. The front cover was blue and had a light blue face on it portraying maybe Zeus, and also some horse-type being and the Parthenon.

We had a "library day," and it seems like one year it was Tuesday and the next year it was Friday. I remember getting a notice for keeping out some particularly awesome issue of Cat Fancy magazine for too long -- all I did was look at cute cat pix -- and my Mom acting like I was a nut.

In November of Year 3, Adelaide was suffering from a swarm of locusts which lead to the short-lived but popular craze of catching locusts in our lunch boxes until our parents were absolutely freaked out when a few locusts would fly out and around their kitches that night.

The ongoing saga in Year 3 when Brian Kennedy loaned a book about frogs from the school library and never returned it. Which meant that every time we went to the library, we would have to listen to the same spiel from the library teacher, telling Brian that there was another kid in Year 5 desperately waiting for the book to be returned as he had to do a school project about frogs. And it went on like this for six months.

Brian never returned that book.

an entire circular plywood table of my closest pals

Not plywood, particle board!

There was some kind of punishment in elementary school called Independent Dining, which meant that...you had to eat alone. Amanda Satterfield and I made fun of this via a dance in which you marched and saluted while singing the word "independent" in a low mannish voice and then acted fancy by curtsying and clinking imaginary glasses while singing "dining" in a high-pitched voice.

:)

can i just:

My nickname in Year 1 was "Go Go Fast Run".

― challop matters (King Boy Pato), Saturday, July 25, 2009 4:33 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

i love that so much

i got my name on the board the first day of elementary school cuz I went to wash my hands, the teacher said "sit down", and I said "no".

also won my 5th grade spelling bee and everybody accused me of cheating. in reality the words were just hella easy.

In Year 6, our class had a competition to earn as much money as possible in a game called 'Goldfields' (education game based on life in the ye olde days of the Australian goldfields) on the Macintosh Classic. All my fellow classmates (literally) went for gold by attempting to cross the quicksand in order to reach the promised riches of the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, resulting in their character ending up in the ye olde hospital. I had an efficient portfolio of shares in the more accessible mines, the local pub, the market gardens and the hospital. I ended up with the most money at the end of the semester.

During Year 6, we put in our preferences for an elective music class on Tuesday afternoons. Thankfully I managed to escape the hell of playing the recorder and ended up in something called 'Computer Music'. On day one, I took the keyboard and played what in retrospect could be termed 'some early Cabaret Voltaire shit' before the teacher intervened and said "you need to play something tuneful".

we had to write stories in 4th grade, and we had this hot-tempered kid named Nathan in the class. when he wasn't beating on kids, he was sometimes good for hilarity.

Like one time, during show and tell, some kid was answering questions about the lame thing they brought, when this kid Joey ran in, with Nathan behind him, nostrils flaring, and he picked up and launched his entire backpack at him, narrowly missing kid's head. teacher sent him to principal's office.

then during story time in 4th grade, he started telling a story about how an alien visited him, and it was a normal, good story, and then he just blurts out "so I kicked him in the balls, but I don't think he had any". entire class breaking down in hysterics, angry conservativey teacher sends him to principal's office.

then we were told to answer some questions about our favorite things to the class and he decided to troll, so he got up in front of the room:

"Favorite toy: Pizza
Favorite food: Pizza
Thing you look forward to after school: Pizza
Favorite hobby: Pizza
Something you'd bring with you on a desert island: Pizza
Write a short poem about one of your favorite things:

Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza
Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza
Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza
Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza
Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza
Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza
is a satisfying food