Grade The Third

14

Third grade was relatively uneventful in and of itself. At the start of the year I pined for being moved to the same school district where my sister taught third grade so I could see her daily again. But of course that wasn't going to happen.

Third grade did bring a few daily routine changes. Gone was second recess, instead replaced with a weekly rotating 'special' which was roughly three days of gym class, one day at the art building, and one day at the school's library. Gym was in the old gymnasium that was part of the elementary school wing, art class was in the original one room school house in the front yard, but the library was deep in the core of the middle school building wing.

When library time came, we would get a long tour down the winding hallway past about two thirds of all the middle school classes. Some were in 'open concept' classrooms which meant it was a large area divided by portable, adult high walls. We could hear those various classes in session as we walked by, but not see them. Then we passed the traditional classrooms of cinder block walls and doors with safety glass windows allowing us to glance in. It was kind of funny that the open concept classes all had even tones of teaching and student discussion, but with the enclosed classrooms, those teachers felt the need to shout their instruction despite the lack of noise coming in from the surroundings. We got a tantalizing glimpse of the new gymnasium in the middle school wing with its shiny smooth floor and pull-out bleachers, then turned the corner and a couple more rooms later entered the library.

We were given no instructions for library time other than to look for books. We would go to areas that interested us, then find our friends at the sections that interested them and compare notes and show-off our findings. Then we were given the five minute warning to line up and check out books for those who wanted, and off we were again down the hallway.

Art class was art class, what more is there to say? Well I guess I should describe it for all the generations that have since gone to school where there was no such thing as art class. We'd walk across the lawn to the old school house and go in the front door at the nearest corner. There was a back door at the opposite corner, but we never used it as it was at the base of the stairs that went up to a second floor. The single open room of the bottom floor was taken up by many project tables where about three of us could sit side by side. Classes were hands on and over the next three years involved pottery, tie-dying tee shirts, learning the spectrum of colors and the difference between hues and pigments. One of the art projects that we did more than once was taking small squares of linoleum and using a gouge to carve lines into it and make designs or sometimes pictures. Then we would get to roll paint on top of these and place them paint side down on paper, the design we had made would be left on the paper in paint. Pottery was pretty much shaping things out of clay and letting it dry, sometimes we could then paint the dried items and give them to the teacher to be put into the kiln and baked. As this took overnight and we only had the class once a week, we would just get the baked pieces back the following week and see what worked and hadn't worked when it came to shapes and colors. There was one pottery wheel where one could spin the clay and make round, regular shapes, but with one wheel versus all us students, we didn't get to use it and it was reserved for those attending after school sessions.

I'll skip gym class, but instead note that the school had come up with a new way of organizing lunch. In the previous two years, those with bagged lunches joined those who got the school lunch in the cafeteria. Those with bags settled down right away or went to the milk window to pick up a cartoon, while the school lunch kids would get in line and eventually get their tray. As the cafeteria handled both the elementary wing and the middle school wing, it was in high demand during lunch time. For my third and fourth grade years, the school came up with a solution to reduce the number of periods they'd have to schedule time for by splitting the bagged lunch kids from the rest. We were sent to the old gymnasium where they had lined up folding tables against the two long walls with left over classroom chairs of various types for seating. That way kids of many different grades could fit in the cafeteria or the gymnasium at the same time and reduce the number of cycles of lunch serving the cafeteria would have to do. But this back-fired as the cafeteria staff had to serve the same number of school lunch students as before, but with half the time to do it. Friends told me stories of how they'd have to wait in line for the majority of the lunch period to get their tray of food, then just have a couple minutes to wolf down what they could before they had to leave. But for me, as all of my friends got the school lunch and I didn't, I felt like a second class person in the dingy old gym while they got the modern cafeteria...!

Third grade also introduced us to field trips. A couple times it would entail long walks from the school property to the center of town to either get a civics lesson at the little town hall and see the little court room in its basement run by a part-time judge for minor offenses. For three years it included a walk in costume for Halloween candy at the old timey drugstore. A couple of times a walk to the town's library where, instead of looking at books, we would be settled down on the floor of the book stacks back room and watch movies.

Then came one of my favorite field trips of all: The trip to an old Revolutionary war fort. The bus ride there filled us with anticipation of seeing this fort, but once we got there it was mostly just a plot of ground where people had started to rebuild one of the walls based on where they thought the fort had been. Here were a couple of reenactors dressed in period clothes to tell us of the fort, its history, daily tasks, and fights against the Indians, as the British soldiers of the Revolutionary war era never got this far North. To cap off our visit, one of the reenactors told us how lead musket balls were made by melting lead chunks in a cup, then pouring it into a mold. He then showed us the box of already made musket balls where we could each take one as a souvenir of our visit. On the bus ride back to school we played with our muskets balls, some found that if you sucked on it, it would feel funny in your mouth, so then all the kids had to do it to see. This was one of those keepsakes I successfully kept for seven years or so, pulling it out often for more fun!

And now for third grade class itself: It didn't make much of an impression on me.

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