Forty Years Ago in Third Grade

Ah, cute little me with my buck teeth, buzzed head and little ivory husky dog bolo tie from Alaska.

I guess my lips had healed enough to smile without bleeding by class photo day.

This was my worst year in public education. I don't remember hating the teacher, although she was difficult to look at, until AFTER she taped my mouth shut using surgical adhesive tape and kept me after school for talking in class. When she pulled it off it ripped my lips enough to make them bleed and it hurt like hell. It was impossible to hide the swelling and the injury from my parents. When my mother found out about it she left the house in a rage. She was hysterical. I thought she was going to kill her. But, alas, she didn't.

Mrs. Jacobs was a foul teacher. She scared some of the kids so badly they wouldn't ask for permission to go to the bathroom. I'm not sure now who she was, but a girl sitting behind me peed in her chair. She had been wiggling intensely for some time. I could hear it and I was curious so I turned around in time to see it spilling off her seat onto the floor. And then she burst into tears and I felt bad for her. Of course she ended up with a pile of sawdust under her desk to soak it up.

So I became her friend. But she went on to tell me weird things like "babies come out of their mothers bums." I assumed that was the truth for quite a while.

Luckily I never puked in school. But I seem to remember seeing that odd sawdust stuff soaking up vomit quite frequently. It's no wonder, though, since at that school you weren't allowed to leave the lunchroom until you'd finished everything on your pastel-colored divided tray. And they frequently served cooked, canned spinach. So there was a lot of barfing going on. We learned to load up our milk cartons with what we absolutely couldn't eat.

I was only in this school for one year, thankfully. Besides getting my mouth taped shut, I got into trouble for trying to burn down the school with a magnifying glass. At recess I was outside looking at things and to be fair, I had burned a hole in a piece of paper to amaze my classmates, but I got dragged into the principal's office by my ear and lectured about the dangers of starting fires after some moron saw me looking at the bricks after my hole-in-the-paper demonstration. It was humiliating and I didn't know who snitched or I might have gone psycho on their ass.

I went to the same school for 4th grade too but fortunately it didn't last longer than a few days. There was a huge fight outside during recess and I thought I was doing the right thing by running inside to tell somebody about it. The fight got broken up and I got into trouble for "telling" by the kids AND the principal. I had had enough of that school. My mom had heard enough and graciously took me to Central school where I had gone for a very idyllic second grade and re-enrolled me there.

My primary education was salvaged! I was delighted to find myself in Miss Arellano's classroom with "old" friends. My life returned to normal learning things like The Pledge of Allegiance which I couldn't recite without forgetting parts of to save my life when I was awake but could, according to my grandmother, recite over and over and OVER perfectly in my sleep. Once she told me about that, it gave me confidence and I relaxed and was able to learn it. I stopped talking in my sleep and went back to grinding my teeth.

Hmmm. Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance repeatedly in my sleep; maybe I was just trying to keep away the bad dreams about babies coming out of their mothers' bums.