The suburban counties surrounding Baltimore City send their children back to school today; Baltimore — quite properly — waits until the Tuesday after Labor Day. Last night, I looked at a 10-year-old’s fresh notebook — looseleaf paper in a binder, with a zippered pencil case with 12 pencils at the ready. (“They told us to bring 12!” I was told when I remarked on the number.) At any rate, I was reminded of fresh starts, and my vain attempts to keep neat notebooks, with torn holes reinforced and subject headings bright in those color cellophane tabs. By Halloween, my notebooks were a wreck.
My thoughts leaped — naturally, morbidly — to the most humiliating moments of school. I still can’t speak of the single worst day of my life, a day in which I somehow avoided the fate of being marked for life as a loser/nerd, but simply by sheer luck. Instead, when grade school comes up, I always think of the day in fifth grade when I was placed in the dummies math group. Oh, we weren’t supposed to know we were the weakest, but we always did, didn’t we? My mother looked at the paper that had resulted in my placement and realized I had worked every long division problem properly, but I had copied them wrong. I needed glasses.
The thing is, that still wasn’t enough to get me out of the dummies group. I had to score well on the next test to do that. My answers were wrong. Years later, in a college math course, I would score poorly on a midterm for the opposite reason. My answers were right, but I didn’t reach them the correct way.
I still think of that fifth-grade teacher, a woman who sometimes put on pink house slippers in the afternoon as her feet swelled and began to ache. What happened to other kids, ones whose parents were less vigilant, who just looked at the red circles around their answers and said, “Yep, guess you’re not very good at long division.”
Anyway, as a back-to-school-special — please share a humiliating memory. Or a happy one, if you insist.
I was actually at the other end of the math spectrum. You can picture me. I was the annoying kid that always had his hand up to give answers while the rest of the class was just trying to get the concept.
Sadly, nobody told me it wasn’t cool to be smart. but that wasn’t the embarrassing thing — that came on gym day.
My Catholic school, in Port Washington, NY, didn’t have P.E. every day. We had gym once a week. The boys wore shorts under our requisite charcoal gray slacks (uniform), and before gym, we removed the slacks and went to gym.
One morning, I somehow forgot to put on the shorts, and when the teacher called for the boys to get ready for gym, I dropped my pants for the class — boys and girls and teacher — and stood there redfaced in my little jockeys, waiting for the raucous laughter to subisde. Needless to say, it took a while.
And I still had to go to gym.
I imagine it was a treat for all the other kids to see me humiliated. I never raised my hand in math again.
The oddest thing is what first came to mind at the phrase “back to school” which was the feeling of the weather in September. I grew up in Hartford and I seem to recall very cool mornings, when you’d head out shivering, but things would warm up; by the time school was out, warm and sunny. I do NOT know why that’s what I recall; the combined dread/excitement of going back to school ( I was a school weenie; I loved it. For some time, I was “the smartest girl” in my classes AND everyone knew I skipped a grade (first) and I liked school.) I was one of those “never skipped” types (ok, finally did in high school knowing they’d never believe I skipped school) and close to a teacher’s pet, I think, though I never felt like that. I remember making book covers for my books from stuff we either bought, or were given – first fancy, then brown paper bags. Do kids still do that? I vaguely remember buying my older sister a pencil box when she started grad school. Was amazed to see recently ads for donaitons (that’s not the amazing part, alas) which included rulers and protractors. Somehow, I think I thought we were past that stuff….it’s the 21st century man!
The weirdest of humiliations – actually getting in so deep on a late assignment I didn’t know how to get out of it.
And Laura? In h.s. I had a guidance counselor (oy, gods) who wanted me SO to take more math class as I was good at math, although I HATED it. The first words out of her mealy-mouth when I got into the college of my choice were “you’ll need math for that”. I did not take math in college and senior year, when I was facing the GRE’s, took a 2 day brush -up offered by the math dept. students and scored higher on the math GRE than I had on my SATs. And no, I didn’t send a copy to that guidance counselor with the snippy note “so, I need MATH huh?” but I thought about it.
On ‘tother hand, I was carried through my grad school statistics class by a wonderful group of friends; we were a determined grad school bunch. NO ONE was going to flunk out if we could help it. I still miss some of them – some of the best folks I knew.
Andi
Book covers! Yes, you had to make covers for the school-owned texts. Some years you might purchase them, other years it was cooler to make your own, but they never lasted.
I think this ended by junior high, as the cover of my Algebra I book haunts me to this day.