Liam's teacher just sent home a homework assignment for his parents (what the?! I thought I was done with school!?). The homework is a sheet called "Back in the Day," which is offensive in the first place because it made me feel awfully old, and required us to talk to our child about when we were in fourth grade and then write a page about it.
It took me a while to think of fourth grade, clearly they were memories that I had blocked out and suppressed. Then I texted my mom to figure out how to spell my teachers name and she reminded me of a few things about my teacher, and all the memories came flooding back, scary and unstoppable, like a nightmare. It probably wasn't really
that bad, but in my nine/ten year old mind I remember this year being the worst year of my elementary school career.
As I actually wrote my paper I thought it was funny, in a sardonic kind of way... and I thought it would be good to pass on to posterity, or at least give my elementary school friends a good giggle.
"I Feel Old"
When I was in fourth grade I went to Grovecrest Elementary School in Pleasant Grove, Utah. My teacher was a woman with short, curly, bright-red hair and huge, round, wire-rimmed glasses named Mrs. Lamoreaux. I remember her being loud, strict, and slightly crazy. She love to sing and we spent much time learning songs and dances that we used at the end of the year as our class put on a "broadway production," complete with matching wardrobes and many costume changes.
We had two play structures for our recesses. One we called, "the Big Toy," that mostly kindergartners played on and the another green and purple playground that we aptly named, "The Barney." One of our favorite games was to have a large boy sit at the bottom of a twirly slide, then have many children follow, resulting in us being stuck and squished until the large boy moved and we all toppled off the slide.
Excellent, right? I left out things like remembering children getting in trouble and having to sit in the corner, much high pitched yelling, and several times the main, in trouble, corner sitter actually grabbed his backpack and left the school ground while the teachers back was turned and didn't return for the rest of the day. That couldn't have been good.
