Third Grade Blues
Getting Near The End Of Another School Year
And so, we enter the last week of third grade. Where has it all gone?
I have exactly one memory of third grade. You see, I went to a Catholic school and my first and second grade teachers were nuns. (Yes, yes, someday, I’ll write about the nuns!) But third grade was the first time I had what they called a lay teacher. A non-nun.
For the life of me, I can’t remember her name but for some reason I think it started with a G. So I’ll call her Miss G.
Anyway, the ONLY (literally the only) memory I have of all of third grade was Miss G. giving us a history quiz where we all sat around in a big circle and she’d ask basic history questions like “Who was the first president” or “Who sewed the first flag” and whoever snapped their fingers first, got to try to answer.
But I didn’t know how to snap my fingers and was near tears over it. So Mrs G. grabbed two of those plastic letters, like the kind you’d slap onto a fridge, and I’d bang them together to make a clicking sound. I still didn’t win anything, but I was grateful.
Anyway, where am I going with this? I’m not sure. Something about time flying by I suppose.
Little Bean has loved third grade, and she’s loved her teacher as well. (SHOUT OUT TO MRS. KEW!) Third grade has felt like something of a watershed for her - the time when she started branching out on her own, her own style, her own sassiness - tentative first steps toward tween-dom and beyond.
“Daddy,” she asked me the other day, “how many school days left before school ends?”
I did the math in my head. “14 days.”
She rolled her eyes with an “Ugh!”
“What?” I said. “I thought you liked school?”
“I do.” she said. “I just don’t want it to be over.”
Me either, baby, me either.
My third grade teacher, Mrs P was ancient even by 10 year old kid standards, when every adult was "old". In fact, she retired after the following school year. She was definitely old school. She HATED the fact that I was left handed and was constantly reorienting my paper to make the cursive come out more "normal". No rapping on the knuckles with a ruler, but she toed right up to that line. More than one of us got a ruler slammed down on our desks for some infraction or another. One kid spent more time in the hallway "counting the dots" on the drop ceiling tiles than he did in the classroom somedays. And, weirdly, I remember her reading us The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis. That's what I remember about third grade.
I went to a Catholic/French Canadian grammar school...half day of French/half English. Preserving the heritage so I can understand that. What was unpleasant to nauseating were the nuns. I have nothing but nightmares as my memory of them. They should've been allowed to marry or have boy friends to relieve some of those hormones!!