Elementary School

Elementary school was pretty easy for me. I think that's why it was my favorite part of my school career. I was the smart kid, I was on top. Once I got to middle school I was just another kid.

My first grade teacher was Mrs. Webb. She had short red hair and was really nice. She let us choose names for our table groups depending on the holiday. Somehow she always remembered the different names, even though they changed quite often. A few years after I was out of Mrs. Webb's class, my mom was watching the news and heard that her husband had been killed in a plane crash. It was pretty sad, she was fairly young.

Like I said in my earlier post, Mrs. Slaughter was my second grade teacher, but I don't remember anything else about that year. In third grade I had Mr. Galloway. He was an older man who always wore slacks and a button up shirt. He would use his knuckle to point to a word or whatever else he needed to draw our attention to on the chalkboard. He also had a comb-over that always flew straight up in the air whenever the wind blew. We tried to keep from laughing as we stood in line outside to come in for recess. I saw him years later with a toupee. I don't know what was funnier.

Mr. Galloway is the only elementary school teacher that ever publicly scolded me. A boy had been teasing me one day and I kicked him in the shin. Immediately Mr. Galloway bellowed, "Karen, I can't believe you'd do such a thing! I'd expect that kind of behavior from others but not from you!" The class went dead silent and I could feel my face turn red from embarrassment. I had to try really hard to keep my eyes from watering. I never understood how some kids could get yelled at all the time for bad behavior and it didn't phase them. I took it very personally and hated to ever disappoint any of my teachers. I was a bit of a teacher's pet... always wanting to help out, always one of the first to raise my hand. I loved parent-teacher conference because my parents always came home with comments about how smart and well-behaved I was. I was "a teacher's dream."

I did get a stern talking to from Mrs. Beutler, my fourth grade teacher. My friends and I would pinch each others butts because we thought it was funny. We were too young to realize that was the stuff of sexual harassment. Mrs. Beutler pulled me aside one day and told me it was inappropriate and that if anybody did it again I should tell them to stop it in a very forceful tone. I was very embarrassed that time as well, but at least she had the tact to censure me in private. I probably would have melted and died had anyone else heard that conversation. On a different note, I believe that was the same year my "boyfriend," Jeremiah, and I broke up over Nintendo.

Mrs. Cazier was my fifth grade teacher. She told us that we could remember how to say her name by saying, "Cuz air is good for ya!" She was my favorite teacher in elementary school. She read books aloud to the class on a regular basis and those books became some of my all time favorites... "Matilda," "Hatchet," and "The Witches" just to name a few. Mrs. Cazier was a skinny, brunette woman who was naturally pretty. Some boys in my class once asked her how much she weighed and she said 115 pounds. They were all amazed. She would randomly draw a student's name from a jar once a week and whoever she picked would get to choose a prize from a pencil box full of surprises. I won all the time; it was great.

For some reason I can't remember my sixth grade teacher's name. It might have been Ms. Beck, but I'm not sure... I think it started with a "B" though. She was nice enough on a one-on-one basis but tended to get a little crabby with the class as a whole. I saw her at the mall one time coming out of a lingerie store. She was probably embarrassed but I didn't think anything of it. I was just excited because I'd seen my teacher.

The only other memory I have of sixth grade is not a pleasant one. I was a bit of a late bloomer and all the other girls were wearing their training bras by that time. I had been too timid to ask my mom if I could get one too (not that I needed it). My class was walking down the hall one day and a couple of the popular boys were messing around and snapping all the girls bras. A boy named Jason came up and tried to do it to me and when he couldn't he said, "She doesn't have one!" and they all started snickering. It was pretty humiliating. I was very self-conscious about that anyway and that little incident definitely didn't help. It's kind of sad in a way to look back at all the time I wasted worrying about what I looked like. I see my old school pictures and think I looked pretty dorky, but then, all the other kids did too. You don't see the big picture when you're a kid.

Kindergarten

Kindergarten is a funny word... I wonder why we have some crazy name for that grade... all the other grades sound so boring. Five year olds sure are great, aren't they? They've reached the age where they can poop and talk pretty well on their own, plus they usually haven't developed their bratty attitudes yet and still think grown-ups are cool. Anyway, onto my story...

I went to Rosamond Elementary. It was only a block or so from the house so I walked to school everyday. The school wasn't much to look at, just a squarish cement building painted a light peachy color. I used to peel the paint chips off the wall during recess if I happened to be "it" during some game where I had to count. I never ate the paint chips and never saw anybody else do it either. It never even crossed my mind. I can't understand why kids would eat paint chips... how good could they taste? It's not like paint is made out of sugar or potatoes. On second thought, maybe the other kids were eating them and that's the reason why I was at the top of my class during the elementary years.

I always thought the Kindergarten playground was great. There was this giant spider with ladder legs that was my favorite. The body was a big yellow disk that several friends could sit on while I pretended to drive the spider using the cantaloupe sized black eyeballs as the steering wheels. I imagined wreaking havoc in the city... crushing cars and climbing over houses on my enormous spider robot. I don't remember playing in the big sandbox much or on any of the other playground equipment. The spider was definitely the coolest thing out there, which is funny because I'm deathly afraid of spiders and always have been.

Ms. Slaughter was my teacher for both my Kindergarten and 2nd Grade years. Her name sounds menacing but I think I liked her OK. Both times she was my teacher we ended up having a substitute for half the year because she was out having a baby. She looked old at the time, but I guess when you're five, everyone looks old.

As far as classroom time goes I don't remember much. There was a kitchen play-set in there but I never got to play with it because all the other girls always seemed to get there first. We also had to walk on a balance beam once.

We got to use the big crayons in Kindergarten and I loved how pretty my new crayons were when I opened the box at the beginning of the year. I'm sure they didn't stay very pretty for long. I still love to open a new box of crayons... they look like perfect little rows of soldiers. The crayon making episode of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood was one of my favorites. I've always liked to open new jars of peanut butter too.

One day after we'd finished some activity my teacher told us to get into our table groups so we could go watch a movie in the other room. For some reason I hadn't heard her mention the part about watching a movie and thought it was time to go home. My group was the first one chosen to go to the other room, but instead I walked right out the front door and went home. When I got home my mom asked why I was back so early and I told her the teacher said we could go. The next day a girl in my class said I'd missed a good Mickey Mouse movie. Dang. Since then I've always wondered how no one noticed when I walked out the door and what Mickey Mouse movie it was.