 I decided to write this one today, because I started reading Roald Dahl’s Matilda again. Yes, it’s a children’s book, but it’s been since I was a child since I read it. It’s always worth rereading books, especially if it’s been a long time. But the story has put me in the mind of going to school as a kid. Off we go! This is a tricky topic to write about simply because every year of school on Earth is radically different from the last. So, I find myself wandering in a soup of different experiences, most of which are clustered together in sensible order. Many of which are not. I cannot guarantee I will get my when’s correct here. But I’ll try my best. Most likely, this will be an assortment of different scenes and experiences. Consider it like flipping through a photo album. It will also have to be done in parts, because, well…it’s not easy to condense 12 years of schooling in a single post. Well, without further ado. I’m 5 years old on the bus looking out the back window. My grandma is behind the bus with my little brother who’s 3. My mother is somewhere behind the bus, too, but I think she’s sitting in the car waving. It’s hard to see. The window is dirty. I’m crying. Every kid cries on the first ride to school. I don’t know of any who don’t. Now it’s later in the year. I have a toy in my pocket that my grandma said I could take to school. It’s shaped like a box of french fries, which means it probably came from a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. It has a wind up knob that makes it walk. I was playing with it on the bus, but now I have to go to class. There’s a rule about no toys in the classroom, so I put it in my pocket since I don’t have anywhere else to put it. I don’t think to put it in my backpack as I’d have to take that off and I don’t want to right now. My kindergarten teacher confronts me in the hallway. “Is that a toy in your pocket?” She demands. “No.” I know she’s going to take my toy from me. It’s mine, not hers. I don’t want her to have it. “Let me see.” “No. I don’t want to.” She grabs my arm. Not hard, but the forwardness of it scares me. I don’t like being touched, especially when someone’s feeling angry at me. My eyes tear up. “Don’t lie to me,” she says forcefully. I take the toy out of my pocket. Now I’m just crying. Mostly I feel ashamed for lying to her, but at the same time I don’t feel it’s her right to know what’s in my pocket in the first place. So, I feel ashamed of that, too. She takes my toy. I knew she would. I get it back at the end of the day, but I end up throwing it away. The joy’s gone all out of it. Still kindergarten. We’re learning about the sense of taste and the tongue. We have to try different foods with different flavors and match them where you feel they are on your tongue. I’m good at this, but we get to “bitter” and I have to eat a piece of red radish. I find I hate bitter, and spit it out. Teacher chides me for being rude. “Then you eat the radish,” I think. But I say nothing and turn red in embarrassment. (It took me 31 more years before I’d eat red radish in anything. Even a salad.) First grade. I’m playing house with classmates on a rainy day. This is fun. I like to pretend cook and pretend talk on the phone (I wonder what all I repeated that came out of my actual household…) and pretend clean the house. But I don’t want to hold the baby. Samantha does instead. Most of the other girls do. House gets boring, so I go build things with legos and blocks with the boys. Sometime that year, there’s a scene in the cafeteria at lunch. One of the boys who bullies me has taken out a chapstick. He’s older than me by a year or two. He leans forward to all his friends, and for some reason I’m sitting a few people down from him and across. (Side note: I am 6-years-old, and at this time in my life my son Aphi is piloting this body. The veil is quite thin on my incarnated self. He doesn’t remember he’s an adult Taygetan male. He does remember most everything else. This is all his recollection.) “I’m gonna blow up this whole school with this,” he says with malice in his eyes. I have no idea why he’s saying this. I have no idea the context for this conversation, but I take one look at that thing of chapstick, know it is entirely possible, and tell him. “You can’t! There’s innocent people here!” I can feel panic rising in my throat. The bully grins. He has me hooked. “All these kids are gonna die. Kaboom!” “NO!” I’m crying. “I won’t let you!” “Oh, yeah, well who’s gonna stop me? You?” I keep staring at that chapstick. I know exactly how the detonating mechanism works. I know where you’d push to make it go boom. I know the chemical compounds needed. I can even see the fireball created that would blow up the whole cafeteria. I am now feeling completely hysterical. “I’ll go tell the teacher right now! What kind of monster are you! How could you! What’s wrong with you!” I start to get up. Several other kids pull me back down. They don’t want the teachers over here. They don’t want to be part of the trouble. I’m making a scene. The bully’s face changes. (Kyrie: I know this change all too well.) He goes from gloating and triumphant to suddenly scared and confused. “I’m not serious, you idiot. It’s a chapstick. You can’t actually blow up anything with a chapstick. What’s wrong with you. You can’t actually believe me. It’s a joke.” As he’s saying this, I’m blown away, “You’re lying? Why would you joke about something like that?” Now I’m feeling hurt, confused, angry, all over the place. I’m still crying, and now it’s just compounded and made worse by the fact that this kid was lying and joking about hurting people. I also wonder in my head, “How can I believe you if you’re lying? What if you’re lying about lying?” Eventually, bully kid and his friends get up and walk away. One of my classmates looks at me concerned. “You don’t think he’s actually going to do it, do you?” “I don’t know.” And I really don’t. We’re doing end-of-year standardized testing. It’s the “Iowa Test” where I live. My teacher goes over the scores with my parents. I’ve gotten 98+ percentile on everything. There’s discussion about something I don’t understand. Maybe skipping grades. Maybe something else. Nothing comes of it. Second grade. We’re learning to use computers. I like computers. They’re fun. I’m good at using the paint program with a mouse, and sometimes we play math games with little blue smurfs. I like this game a lot. We also play the game Oregon Trail, and my classmates and I learn how annoying “dysentery” is. But I really love Oregon Trail as a concept. I love all the little Western towns. I love going to the little general store and stocking up on supplies. It feels right and familiar to me to do this. I’m pretty good at hunting, but my classmate Townsend is better at it. (Side note: walk-in experience happens somewhere around here.) Sometime that year, we have show and tell. I bring a pet snake one time, and then another time I bring my cat, Tiger. Mom helps me with this. She’s not sure I should bring the snake, but I think the snake would be cool. There’s one afternoon where we have to write a history essay. My teacher is one of those rare teachers that knows when a student is capable of more and is just “meeting the standard” because that’s what everyone expects. She knows I can do more than I let on. So, just before recess, she pushes me on this essay. I do not remember what we were writing about, but every time I take my essay up to her, she challenges me to make the writing better. I know she didn’t make everyone else do this, and I know it’s not because I’m poor at writing. She wants to challenge me, but I don’t understand why at the time. I end up being late for recess, but I also end up writing beyond normal second grade means. As a reward, I get to pick anything I want from the reward closet. This is basically a supply closet where there’s a shelf our teacher uses for rewards. Usually it’s pencils, candies, children’s books, and children don’t usually get to pick. I get to pick. So, I pick up a collection book of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. I still have this book to this day. Third grade. Hmm. This was a tough year. This was the year I had a walk-in experience that caused all kinds of upsets. The walk-in experience happened in the winter time at the end of second grade. Aphi is out, and this soul has walked in. I get the flu a couple of times. Strep throat. Colds. Over the summer, we go to the beach and I get burnt to a crisp. I can’t even wear a shirt. Before the year even started, I have to change schools. This is because the school district caught on to my mother sending me to the school closest to my grandma. This is not permitted. Your school is determined by where you live. We do not live by grandma. We live 15 miles away. So, I change schools. My third grade teacher is mean and spiteful. I make friends in class, one of them lives in my neighborhood. Her name is Krista. She becomes my best friend, and even gets me to start painting my nails. There are a couple of hamsters in the classroom, and I love having them. I beg my mom for a hamster. She says “No, you already have cats”. So I keep pet frogs, turtles, snakes at home instead. I don’t remember much about school in this year. I remember my teacher making fun of my chipped nail polish. (I’m 8-years-old for crying out loud, woman!) This is embarrassing, but I’m more annoyed by it than hurt. I’ve become a little distrustful of people. By the end of the year, I learn why she’s spiteful and mean. My teacher is going through a divorce. My mother explains what this means, and I feel really sad for my teacher. That must hurt a lot and I bet she’s been really sad, too. I decide not to take her meanness personally. Oh, but there’s Field Day at the school, and this is the first time I’m old enough to do this activity. Field Day is like the Olympics for elementary schools. And it is the BEST day EVER. You don’t have to do any work. You go outside all day, and are given free rein to try whatever track and field sport you like. I find I’m a very fast sprinter and end up placing well in the 100-yard dash. I think I get a bronze for that one, but other than that, I just have fun. That year I found I was generally more interested in sports. I’m good at kickball, and think that’s fun. I remember gym classes a lot in this year, and I also remember one other event. Sometime in the late fall, Hurricane Opal crashes through our area. It pours buckets of rain for weeks on end. Because of this, we cannot play outside. So, recess becomes dance lessons. Line dancing. Square dancing. Polka dancing. Celtic step dancing. I think even a little ballroom dancing, but most of us are all too shy to be dancing with each other. It’s a little awkward. And then of course, the Macarena, which has infected everyone like some dancing virus. I’m laughing now as I write this, because it really did get into everyone’s heads, adult and child alike. Didn’t matter where you’d go, there’s the Macarena and there’s everyone spontaneously breaking into coordinated dance. Too bad things like that don’t last very long. It was really funny how that would happen. (What if life was more like a musical?) One last thing to wrap up this year. During our yearly standardized testing, I’m given a new test. I don’t know what this test is at the time, but it’s full of word problems, logic puzzles, and math sequencing problems. I’m interested in it, because it’s unlike any test I’ve ever taken before. I like all the puzzles. My mother says it’s a “gifted test”, but nothing happens after I take it. I don’t score high enough, she tells me. While I don’t know what that means exactly, I know it’s important to her and I’m sad I didn’t do well enough. I decide I’ll do it better next time. Fourth grade. This was a special year. We do the special gifted test again at the start of school. My mother is adamant I pass this test and do well. So, I do it again and I score high enough. This changes everything. First off, my schedule is changed. No longer do I go to the same class every day of the week. On Wednesdays, I get on a bus and go to another school. The bus we get on is the shorter, smaller bus reserved for the children who have learning difficulties and disabilities. And for those of us in the “gifted program”, and I learn it’s called. At fist, this is awkward and embarrassing. But I make friends really quickly with the four other kids on the bus, and a girl Jamie and I joke about the short bus, known for having retarded kids, now has the smart kids too. “We’re opposite ends.” She gets it. Jamie’s smart and pretty. (Later on in high school she turns out downright gorgeous.) Some kids are smart and mean. But not her. She’s nice, too. Eventually, she ends up being very popular, but she was always one of those special people who never let it go to her head. She was always nice to EVERYONE, and I admired her a lot for that throughout all my years in public school. I held her up as an example of what kind of person to be. Gifted classes are like nothing else. We’re not taught normal school things. Instead, we spend our day going over brain teasers (visual word puzzles), red herrings (verbal story puzzles), and every other puzzle you can think of. I LOVE this experience. I look forward to it every week. I never realized how hungry I was for this kind of thing, but I become aware that I’m starving for it. Wednesdays rapidly eclipse the rest of fourth grade. I don’t remember much about my normal studies that year. I do fine, like always. It’s not that challenging. Fifth grade. I remember my teacher specifically this year. She was special, but I can’t put my finger on why. She was a bit like my second grade teacher, but softer. Less driven and hard-nosed. Relationships with my classmates have gotten strained. Mostly, it’s because everyone’s around 10-12 years old, which means they’re all edging towards puberty. So, things have gotten a little weird. The girls are isolating each other, and the boys are both running away from the girls and running towards them. Nobody knows what to do with themselves. This is the year of the bad birthday party and the parting of ways with my best friend. I decide that year that I want to invite all my school friends to my birthday. I’ve never liked big, giant parties, but dammit that year, I wanted a big, giant party. At the roller rink. With ice cream cake. So, I invite 27 people. Only 4 show up. And none of those 4 are my best friend. I am heartbroken. Like beyond heartbroken. One of those 4, however, is a girl named Melissa, who I think likes me in a way that I don’t understand at the time. But she kept taking quite a lot of liberties with kissing me on the cheek and giving me lots of hugs. I am so oblivious, I think she’s just being friendly. Now I look backwards, and I laugh at myself. Eventually, I think I caught on to something being off and had to tell her I don’t like her the same way. Anyway, I’m not interested in that direction. Instead, I like my classmate Matthew. I write him a Valentine’s card, and he writes me one. He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen and the whitest hair I’ve ever seen. For a 10-year-old he’s curiously old fashioned in his behavior, and I really, really like that. His parents are strangely old. In fact, I think they’re his grandparents, but I don’t remember clearly. I just remember his parental situation was a little weird. Everything about him was a little…weird. Not in a bad way, just in an obscured way. Like you couldn’t find out much about him kind of way. That year in school our teacher introduces us to algebra before we’re supposed to learn about it. I find the concept of a variable easy to understand, and I like that we’re doing something more than arithmetic, which I often found boring in the extreme. I also take a music class. I am not very good at playing music, but I find out I can sing pretty well. Except I’m very shy about singing in front of other people. So I don’t do it in class. Gifted classes continue, and now we’re learning French and physics. Physics is addressed in a hands-on manner. We build things and learn about the principles as we are building. I love this way of learning. While I may have lost one friend, I find another in a Spanish-Irish girl (talk about a temperamental combo). Oh my, she gets me in trouble. For some reason, she arrives in my life with a prebuilt understanding of what makes me die of laughter and what things trigger my impish side. And so, she spends most of the Wednesday classes making me die of laughter in the back of the room or otherwise write funny things on the chalkboard so quietly no one can hear us. For the first time in my life, I get yelled at for not paying attention in class. At first, I’m shocked and embarrassed. Then I get smart. I learn how to both pay attention to the teacher and to my friend. That way, when our gifted teacher asks me a question, I immediately respond with the correct answer and there’s nothing she can do about it. All while we’re cutting up and having a blast. This is one of those times where even as a child, I realize I don’t laugh often enough in my home life. Which is probably why my friend is here to save me from becoming far too serious. I’m looking at this and realizing there’s so much more to convey, but I simply cannot convey it all. Not even all of each year. A lot of the time, it’s because the memory of something that happened in a particular year is presently stowed away and not on hand. I’m just not in the vibration of each specific memory, so it’s not available for ready extraction. But those that were available are presented here today.
I shall continue this at another time. But for now… I thank you for your time. Adiamas. —Kyriel Comments are closed.
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