I Go Fourth!

18

Fourth grade was an odd bag. Unlike the previous years where the teacher introduced herself and added the usual behavioral expectations for the students during the year, my fourth grade teacher told us a story of a student from the year before who had been lacking throughout. But when the end of the school year came, he went up to her and told her that he felt he hadn't done a good enough job that year and asked to be retained, rather than advance to the next grade level. And because of that, she was very proud of that student and she wanted to be equally proud of us this year.

Did this mean she wanted all of us to come to her at the end of the year and ask to be retained? I wondered.

The first thing that caught my attention when instruction started was when she used a hand-held frame which clasped about five pieces of chalk separated by about four inches each, this allowed her to draw five straight lines across the board instead of the typical one at a time. Looking into it now, I find they are called a 'Music Staff Line'. Back then, I thought this was rather clever as it sped things up. I subsequently saw why she liked it as she was the first and only teacher in my experience who did the classic routine of holding an unruly child after class to write one sentence repeatedly as featured with 'Bart' in the beginning of the Simpsons television show credits. She could quickly put up twenty-five to thirty lines in five or six strokes taking her a minute, and in return the unfortunate student would get to spend a half, to a full, hour filling-out the words that she dictated. While effective, the chalk array device was not perfect as sometimes a piece of chalk would wear differently than the others and thus leave a gap or two, but she quickly filled those in with a couple of quick strokes with a single piece of chalk.

During the school year, the classroom layout would change. Starting with the traditional desks evenly spaced out and facing the front, then side by side pairs, or evenly spaced but facing a different wall, one time it was organized with the desks lined up side by side to make a large squarish 'U'. Each time these changes would be made by the teacher when we weren't there, and thus we'd have to start out these mornings by trying to figure out where our desk was, now. In reflection, the nice thing about this surprise rearrangements was that, rather than always sitting next to your friends from the beginning of the school year until the end, you got to spend a few weeks by kids you didn't know so well and have a chance to get to know them better.

And sometimes a student would find their desk placed right next to the teacher's desk, facing the rest of the students. I believe this was to make that student feel self-conscious about themselves and somehow improve their behavior so they could be moved back within the rest of the students as soon as possible. Yet on the couple of occasions this happened to me, it didn't make me feel any more self-conscious beyond what I already did given my stuttering, and in fact it made me feel special as if I had a personal audience of the rest of the class. So the corrective goal of these times was lost on me.

My favorite project of the year was where we read a book, then made a shoe-box diorama of a scene from the book. By fourth grade trips to the school library had become common and, as I was a budding astronaut to be, I always skipped the fiction books and went straight to the books on space flight and the stars. I particularly liked the ones with proposed space craft for landings on Mars and other solar system investigations. For the diorama I picked a book on the planets and was wowed by the theory that the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars was from a planet that used to be between them, but was broken-up when it got too close to the massive gravity well surrounding Jupiter. With this in mind I made the back of my shoe box with a small red planet Mars to the left and the large rim of Jupiter to the right, then on a separate piece of cardboard, drew a circle planet on one side and a broken-up planet on the other. Using a piece of string through two holes on the back of the shoe box and tape to hold that string to a square of cardboard, I rigged it just so that as you pulled the string to move the whole planet from Mars toward Jupiter, it would flip over at the end to show the back side of a broken planet. As mine was the only interactive diorama, that I humbly recall, it gained a lot of interest by the students and even the teacher seemed unusually smitten by my work.

Another unusual aspect of fourth grade was that the teacher had us vote for one of our classmates to be our monitor each week. Their job was to make sure we lined-up in the classroom and proceed down the hallways in an orderly fashion to and from recess, lunch, library, gym, etc. The first thing the teacher would do is ask for nominations, at first she would take the first three, but by the end of the year she would prompt for more and more nominations until she seemed to get a name she wanted. We were to then place our heads down and raise our hands to vote when the student's name we wanted was called from the list. Toward the last few months of fourth grade, after I had been voted in one week, I couldn't believe it as there had been many more popular kids nominated before I had been. To confirm my suspicion, for the following week's vote I turned my head and watched the number of hands raised per student name called, and the teacher's tally once voting was over didn't match what I had seen at all. By the end of the year, after each one of us had gotten to be the monitor for a week, I had concluded that the vote was a formality as the teacher had already decided who it was going to be from the names nominated. And as the voting was secret, we'd never know it was rigged...!

At some point early in the school year, people outside of class became interested in me. It started out with a bunch of us from many different grades being sent to the old gymnasium to fill in bubbles for a test. While bubble tests would become a routine if not an overburdening portion of school life by the turn of the Twenty-First Century, the Fall of Nineteen Seventy-Three was the first time I'd ever seen one, let alone taken one. It was an odd test in that there was no time limit. We were deemed done once we reached the end and we could take as much time as we wanted to think over our answers. At first I enjoyed the novelty of being pulled out of class first thing in the morning for this, but after a few hours, once many of the other students had finished and left, I realized I had missed recess. Oh well, I thought, and soldiered. Eventually lunch time started and the bagged lunch kids started to filter in, the remaining few kids taking the test -- actually I think it was just me -- were moved to a far table. I realized that if I didn't finish soon, I would miss my chance to eat lunch and quickly ran through the last couple of questions to make sure I was done in time.

After the pull-out for that test, I was pulled-out a couple more times. Both of these times to the nurse's office. The first time to look at some cards with multicolored bubbles inside of circles where I was asked what I could see, such as did some of the bubbles inside the circles look like a number and if so what was that number? I was told to stand at one end of the room and look at ever smaller rows of symbols and have to state which way the middle line was pointing for each symbol, and there were a couple of other such tests. A week or so later, I was back at the nurse's office, but this time instead of just the nurse being there to greet me, there were about four other people crowded in the little room to observe. I was to sit at a little fold-up table and read aloud the first page or two of a book. It was about Disney World and Walt's inspiration and creation of it. Once I was done reading, those assembled seemed happy and I was sent back to class.

The following month I was routinely taken out of class along with another kid, and two kids from the other fourth grade classroom, twice to three times a week. We were to go to the art building, which was the original one room school building with the one big room on the bottom level serving as the art class space. But for these visits we were taken to the upper floor which was an attic like space divided into a couple of smaller rooms. The bigger 'L' shaped room was used for storage, one room was the building's one person bathroom, and two other smaller rooms. We were taken to one of them with a table and five chairs, two to either side and a better chair for the 'teacher' to sit at the end of the table. And we would play Scrabble for forty-five minutes.

But this wasn't the regular game of Scrabble, with the solid letter pieces, which I had played with my sister in earlier years. This game was a version with a two sided board and cardboard letter pieces, one side of the board was like the regular game, but the other side had words pre-printed on it in the spaces. We would only do the pre-printed side where the words were already spelled-out. Each week, every week. While the novelty of this was okay at first, it was soon quite boring as the only challenge was being the first to randomly pull up the letters that would spell the next available pre-printed word. After a month I asked the 'teacher' if we could play on the other side of the board, but I was told we couldn't. And the calendar year came to a close.

Once school resumed early the next year, there was a day the 'teacher' had to be away doing something else while we were to have our Scrabble session. Once she left, I offered the idea to the other three kids that we could play on the other side of the board and pick our own words as long as there were empty spaces enough for the words to cross and fit. This idea seemed like a surprise to them, but agreeable, and with a quick rummage of the room I found a dictionary that we could use when we weren't sure how a word was spelled, that was how my sister had played it with me. And so we did. And we got to aim for double word and triple word scores with our word choices as part of playing the game and scoring. And we got to flip through the dictionary to make sure we had the right spellings. And we had fun. And I think we actually learned something to boot.

When the 'teacher' arrived at the end of the forty-five minute interval, we showed her how we'd used the other side as well as a dictionary. She was horrified and told us that we could never do that again. From the next time onward, we were back to filling in the pre-printed words on the original side of the playing board once again and through to the end of the school year. I subsequently learned that the Scrabble game we were playing was the children's version and the pre-printed word side was to be used for the first couple of times until one got the hang of how to play the game, then advanced to the regular side of the board. I guess in the eyes of the pull-out 'teacher' we were never going to advance.

Finally, the dreaded day came in fourth grade. I had done something which had annoyed the teacher too much and it was my turn to be held after school and write a repeated sentence over and over again on the chalk board. Some kids she knew lived too far away to walk home, so they got to do theirs during recess or lunch. But she knew I lived within a mile of the school so I got to miss the bus ride home, do my chore, then walk home as an added punishment. I dreaded this day as I was increasingly having problems writing as my fingers and back of my hand would start to hurt and seize-up as the elementary grades had progressed. But as I would only be called lazy when I would complain about this to teachers or my parents, I just did the best I could through the pain. But the pain and frequent seizing of my fingers would mean I'd have to take many little breaks to stretch my hand and wriggle my fingers before I'd go on to write the next word or sentence.

As she used the chalk array device to draw the lines on the board for me, I could easily see this being an hour and a half or a two hour task of pain and tedium until I would then get the chance to walk home. I tried to apologize for whatever I had done to annoy her, but it was to no avail and I began writing the first line, then the second line while she worked on grading papers and organizing her desk. I looked to the chalk array device and it occurred to me how much faster it'd go if I used it, but I knew what she would say if I asked. Fourth copied line, fifth copied line, by the sixth copied line she said she had to go to the office and I was to stay put and keep copying the sentence. Once she was gone and I finished the sixth line and my hand was hurting like hell, I looked back to the chalk array.

When she returned about ten to fifteen minutes later I had just finished filling in the little gaps the chalk array device had left in some of the copied letters. She was very impressed with how quickly I had finished and told me how I must have accepted the truth of the sentence I was to learn as I had been driven to finish it so quickly.

I realized by the end of the week that I'd completely forgotten what that sentence was...

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