Here Cometh Second Grade

10

All seemed right with the world as my sister had finished College and was back living in the house full-time. She was a new teacher and found a job in a nearby town teaching third grade. Alas I was only in second grade, though, so I returned to the same school building as before. But this year, due to the ever growing size of our class, we had been split-up between two teachers. Two of my friends ended up in the other classroom and two were in mine. Also of note, twin sisters had moved to the area and it was decided to place one of each in a classroom. My second grade teacher was the woman I had remembered from first grade who had looked in on us while the first grade teacher had been detained at the office the previous year. No big single experience defined this year, just a few smaller ones.

Unlike first grade where our desks were spread apart or at most in pairs, our desks were now in two columns. Each column made up of two rows of desks facing each other and placed tightly together side by side making a large, if uneven grand table-like surface. In this set-up, the teacher would use three walls to teach from with the back of the room reserved for the true tables which had high tech things called 'headphones' where some individualized lesson materials were played from tape. With our desks so tightly together, the teacher had a pile of cut cardboard boxes. They were cut into three sided partitions which would be arranged on every other desk for tests, providing us privacy as we filled out our answers.

Though we were always told not to look over the cardboard divider and cheat off our neighbors' answers, one day the boy next to me was doing just that. For every question he would hang his head over and wait for me to answer, then tuck his head back for a moment, presumably to write the answer onto his page, then hang his head over the divider again to await my next answer. After a few questions I was surprised that the teacher hadn't noticed this and whispered to the boy, ''Stop that!'' This brought the teacher over to us where she took my test and tore it in two for the rest of the class to see. Stunned for a moment as she'd took the wrong student's test, I tried to speak up, but was shushed. And I was left sitting there as the boy next to me made do by looking at the student's test on the other side of him.

Recess was immediately after the test. As the rest of the students collected their coats to go out this winter day, I went to the teacher to ask about the test and why mine had been torn-up. She said it was because I had been cheating and I would get a zero. When I tried to protest she told me that she would hear none of it, and that was that. I slunk over to the coat hooks and took my coat and followed the last of my class outside.

The play equipment was across the side driveway at the end door. The driveway lead to the combination soccer/baseball field which was not in use this time of year. As we had gotten quite a bit of snow this winter, the excess had been plowed to the parking spaces in front of the game field creating a tall snow-piled wall. The teachers would gather near the end door of the school and chat amongst themselves as recess progressed. Slinking outside, still stunned by the teacher's actions, I noticed the boy who had been cheating was eying me and had gathered two friends of his from the other second grade class. They then started moving toward me.

So I drifted away from them.

But they continued coming my way, putting on a show of just meandering, but that meandering always got closer to me and I continued to drift away, further from the playground area and toward the game field. Soon I realized my mistake as I found myself trapped at the snow-piled wall as the three kids were now openly striding toward me as we were now out of sight of the teachers. I kept one eye on the approaching group and the other on the pile of snow behind me. I could easily image a desperate escape attempt trying to climb up and over the snow wall, but I also realized that they would either grab me by the legs as I tried, or worse we would all make it over the snow wall and then the teachers wouldn't even hear my plaintive screams as I received a good beating.

So I stood my ground and waited for the boys to reach me. Fending off any coming unpleasantness, I promptly said, ''I can do a Mickey Mouse impression!'' This surprised the boys as the cheating boy asked me to repeat what I had said. I repeated I could do a Mickey Mouse impression and, bemused, he told me to go ahead. ''Hi, I'm Mickey Mouse,'' I chirped. He said it sounded more like Minnie Mouse; that got a laugh from his friends. I agreed it might be the case. Then he wanted to make sure I wasn't going to tell the teacher that he had been the one cheating. I told him that the teacher had already told me she wasn't interested and so I didn't see any point saying anything else about it. Was I sure? Yes, I wasn't going to say anything else about it.

With that behind us he looked to his two friends and me and asked if we wanted to play 'King Of The Hill' given the large snow bank we were standing next to, but the bell rang and recess was over and we needed to get ready for lunch...

One time the second grade teacher called in sick. The mother of one of our classmates was assigned to fill in as the substitute teacher for our class. Rather than teach the class, though, she took this time to warn us all of how the school system was stripping us of our culture and homogenizing us. This, most importantly, included taking away our birthright New England accent and she was going to teach us how to properly say words which had consonant pairs. Over the previous year and a half we had been taught to 'blend' consonant pairs into a single sound as we read aloud. That had been wrong, we were told, and we were to pronounce the hidden vowels that were between each consonant pair. It wasn't 'barn' it was 'barin', it wasn't 'truck' it was 'turuck', and so on. We spent the morning going over these words and repeatedly said them 'correctly' and other words as she wanted them pronounced. Then we had morning recess and lunch and returned to spend the afternoon repeating more words 'correctly'. By the end of the day she left us with the instructions that no matter what our teachers told us, we were to always pronounce the hidden vowels!

In retrospect, I realize she never told us about the hidden vowel for 'th' pairs, nor for that matter tell us what to do with three letter consonant combinations; should it be pronounced 'tehoree'? And did 'rr' count as a consonant pair in 'correct', if so should it be pronounced 'cororect'? Given how interesting the day had gone, I eagerly anticipated the next time the second grade teacher would be sick and we'd have our classmate's mother back with more warnings about the school system and how we were being taught wrong. But on the handful of other times the second grade teacher was out, the classmate's mother never returned...

The final reflection on second grade was getting to school. While my brother had been my bus ride guardian for first grade, he had moved on to High School the next year and took an earlier bus that went to a different building. Rather than have me walk the two hundred or so feet away from school to wait at the speed limit sign on my own, my mother had talked the owner of the grocery store into insisting that the school bus stop in front of the store to get his son, 'William'. Being an important person in town, the school did so and my mother would bring me to the grocery store when she went to work each morning. There I would wait with the grocery store owner's son and sometimes visit with his mother, Dorcus, as she waited with us. When it came time for the return trip, the bus would drop us off at the grocery store and I would then touch base with my mother at the store before I walked across the hayfield and hung-out at the house alone until my not as older brother arrived from High School about an hour later.

By about December everything changed and my mother would drive me to the school and drop me off by the end door of the building where I and a handful of other students would wait until the school doors opened. This drive took us from our home past the front of the grocery store where I would see William still waiting for the bus with his mother and I would ask why I no longer waited with him for the bus. I wasn't told. And I now joined the group of a few students where our mothers picked us up at the end of school.

It was during this period where one morning my mother took me to the end school door and dropped me off. It was still wintertime with snow banks surrounding the school and for some reason my legs started to itch. And I would scratch and my undies started to itch, and my shirt, and it was getting progressively worse. As the school doors were locked closed, there wasn't any adult I could talk to for advice and it occurred to me that the cold of the snow bank might numb my skin and make the itching get better. So I sat on the snow nearest the end door and it helped my seat, making that itching go away, but my legs and the rest of me still suffered. So I decided I needed a place were I could lie on the snow and let the cool numbness sooth the rest of my body. Going around the corner of the building, I found a good spot by a classroom window and lay down, arms and legs spread and it did the trick. All the itching went away.

The bell sounded meaning the end door of the school had been unlocked and I should go to class, but staying in the snow with its coolness had been so good, I didn't want to leave. So I stayed for a few minutes more, after all I wouldn't get into trouble being only a few minutes late to class. And I waited a little longer and then realized that I would be so late getting to class that I would get into trouble... Thus becoming a second reason not to leave the snow and go to class.

And so I stayed in the snow, feeling nice & chill and entertained myself by looking into the classroom window. This third grade classroom was the only one divided into the main room with the students, then there was an arch like entry to a back portion that had its own door to the hallway. This portion was mainly used for storage of rarely used items and it was this area that I was by the window. As the third grade class begun I watched the backs of the students as they took their seats and paid attention and sometimes did classwork. Then apparently because it was deemed to be too cold out, they broke into an in-class recess after a couple of hours. As part of this, some of the students drifted into the back portion of the room to get toys to play with or visit with each other. Eventually one of them noticed me in the snow looking at them. She pointed me out to her friends and then they gathered at the window looking at me and I looking back at them.

Their interest and chatter gained the attention of the third grade teacher who came to the back portion and looked out the window and saw me, then she left. A bit later an adult came out the end door and around the corner of the building and asked what I was doing there. I told of my problem with the itching and had found the cold snow was helping, but he or she felt that I should come in out of the cold and see the school nurse. This was my first time seeing the school nurse and she would become a familiar figure for my next several years of Elementary School and Middle School. She had me take off my clothes to find my body covered by a red rash save for my hands and face, and she called my parents and this lead to my mother picking me up and taking me to the doctor.

It turned out my mother had changed the laundry detergent that we used and I was allergic to the new stuff. Mother had to buy some of the old detergent and rewash all of my clothes while I was consigned to spend the rest of the day lying in the bathtub in water filled with a special soothing soap to help heal my skin. By dinnertime the first batch of my recleaned clothes was done and much of the redness of my skin had shrunk down to just a few scaly patches.

This was my first diagnosed allergic reaction, though I never learned the name of what it actually was I was allergic to. As I would later find out, I had been suffering from allergy problems for some time and would be plagued by them for the rest of my life.

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