KINDERGARTEN
I didn’t like trying to spell words by sounding them out because I was afraid of getting them wrong. Ms. Alvarez always encouraged us to make an effort by ourselves before coming to see her, but I never did. Every time we were writing something and I didn’t know how to spell a word, I would walk up to my teacher’s desk and get her to spell it out for me. I didn’t want to try it for myself because I knew I would make a mistake.
I’ve always been a little like that: I’m not ready to try something on my own until I feel like I’ve mastered the material, and I’m quick to hand over a job to someone I feel is more qualified than I am. I don’t always trust my instincts.
So one day—out of either optimism or laziness—I decided not to go up to Ms. Alvarez’s desk and ask her for help, even though I didn’t know how to spell ‘pumpkin.’ We were doing an activity and had to write down a word that we associated with fall. My plan was to wait and see if the boy across from me had chosen ‘pumpkin’ as well and to copy the spelling that he came up with. So I waited and watched him until he got to the part of the activity I was on. And when started sounding out how to spell ‘scarecrow,’ it hit me that my plan was falling through. I was on my own.
So, flustered and disappointed by my failed attempt at kindergarten-style cheating, I tried to sound out ‘pumpkin’ and put together a few letters as well as I could, and I went up to my teacher’s desk to turn in my activity. She looked over it, checked it, wrote a comment, and gave it back to me to take home. I had spelled ‘pumpkin’ wrong; Ms. Alvarez wrote the correct spelling next to mine. But on the same page, she wrote her comment: Proud of Megan for trying!
And that made me pretty proud, too.
FIRST GRADE
When I close my eyes and think back to first grade, I remember the classroom and the procedures that came with it.
I see the months of the year written on 12 separate birthday bags hanging across the top of the wall. I see the calendar stapled below, next to the class jobs and place-value chart. That’s the wall we all faced when we gathered around Ms. Harrington every single morning, as Ms. Harrington wrote the date on the whiteboard that we would copy into our journals when we returned to our desks. As we figured out what yesterday was and today is and tomorrow will be and counted how many days of school there had been and how many more there would be.
I see the Word Wall, empty at the beginning of the year but filled with words by the end. Some letters have more words underneath them than others. ‘V,’ ‘Y,’ and ‘Z’ have no words underneath them—even by the end of the year. ‘A’ has the most. Ant, apple, alligator. Every time Ms. Harrington added a word, we would spell it out-loud together to the beat of our clapping or stomping and then count its syllables. A-N-T: Ant. A-P-P-L-E: Ap-ple. A-L-L-I-G-A-T-O-R: Al-li-gat-or.
I see twenty children sitting on the floor all over the room with folders sitting up in front of them, guarding their tests from the eyes of their peers. I see Ms. Harrington’s eyes monitoring ours as she tells us a word to spell and uses it in a sentence. In first grade, we had to sound out words in our head. There was no talking during a test.
SECOND GRADE
I had an obsession with detectives.
I was an “avid reader.” And my favorite series was called Jigsaw Jones. It’s about a boy in second grade who solves mysteries for his peers. Jigsaw Jones was my hero, and I wanted to be just like him. So I was always looking around for a mystery and a chance to solve it.
Unfortunately, the real world never worked out quite like Jigsaw’s did. The pieces didn’t always fit together like a puzzle to reveal the answer. Mysteries weren’t always solved. My friends and I never figured out who had vandalized the yellow slide on the playground.
THIRD GRADE
Third grade was the year we stopped gathering around the teacher in the morning to go over what day it was—we didn’t have any time to waste. Third grade was the year we started preparing for something serious: the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). Standardized testing took over the curriculum.
Third grade was also the year of acronyms. In addition to TAKS, we learned PLORE: Predict, Locate, Organize, Read, Evaluate. Kindergarten had taught me to read. And now third grade was teaching me to read between the lines.
Second semester, we started doing a reading packet every week. We would read a passage. Sometimes the passages were nonfiction; sometimes they were stories. No matter what, they were always interesting. But we couldn’t take too long enjoying the passage—we didn’t have any time to waste. After reading we would answer questions about what happened. Some of them had obvious answers, but some of them were strange. When I got a question wrong, Ms. Hill would draw a big, red check mark next to my answer.
FOURTH GRADE
My first day of gifted class was my favorite day of school, ever.
Every Wednesday, the fourth grade gifted students got out of their normal classes and spent the entire day with Ms. Labelle. After weeks of testing and waiting for the results, I had been accepted into the program, and on the following Wednesday morning, Ms. Labelle came to my normal classroom and picked me up.
There were five other students in the fourth grade gifted class, and by the end of the day, I was friends with every single one of them. Ms. Labelle treated us differently than any other teacher I had known. She listened to our opinions and discussed ideas with us like adults. She was challenging; we had projects and assignments nearly every week. But I learned more and laughed more than I ever had in class before. On my first day in the class, Ms. Labelle told us a story about the time she jumped out of bed and grabbed her shotgun when her smoke alarm went off while she was sleeping. The six of us students were glued to our chairs even as the bell rang for lunch.
We talked about novels, listened to stories, shared stories and ideas, solved riddles, read picture books, and studied cultures. We didn’t do worksheets or tests. We did hands-on activities and projects. We didn’t sit in rows facing the whiteboard. We sat around a table, facing each other and talking to each other like everyone’s thoughts mattered. And they did.
My first day of gifted class was intimidating and exciting, and I immediately felt like I belonged.
FIFTH GRADE
Mrs. Graham was six-foot-two. She used to play basketball, but decided not to play professionally because she “wanted to get married and have kids.” So instead she became a teacher.
That’s how she told it to us on the first day of school, as she was introducing herself and settling the rules for the class. Her classroom was in a portable, and the walls were covered with old posters about math and science and geography. The thing that bothered me the most was that the posters were laminated, but they hadn’t been cut out well. The poorly laminated posters hung from tacks unevenly around the walls. It felt sloppy. But Mrs. Graham wasn’t really one for style: she cared more about the substance. That proved to be a good thing by the end of the year.
By the end of the year, Mrs. Graham’s class was a team, and Mrs. Graham was our coach. She was fair, and we respected her. By the end of the year, I had stopped noticing the lamination on the posters.
SIXTH GRADE
On picture day, I wore a red V-neck shirt with shiny buttons on the collar. It had puffy sleeves, which were annoying and uncomfortable. I wore a kaki skirt that ruffled on the bottom, and I wore black flats that were also uncomfortable and made my feet sweaty. In first period, my class lined up from shortest to tallest and walked to the gym, where the photo studio had been set up. I was short and near the front of the line. The girl next to me was wearing a lime green shirt with a black jacket and jeans and—like me—black flats, although hers probably didn’t stink. And while we waited in line for our turn to smile, we talked.
And in the next few weeks, I saw that girl everywhere.
I was an anxious little sixth grader. On orientation day the week before school started, my hands trembled as I tried to unlock my very first locker. I had no luck. When my father tried and didn’t either, we were forced to report a broken locker and request a new one. And my new one just so happened to be right above hers, the girl I met on picture day.
And I kept seeing her. I saw her in math class, two periods of language arts, physical education, and choir. Five out eight periods, she was there.
Because of our language arts teacher’s schedule, our class was forced to eat lunch during the seventh graders’ lunch period. Our LA class was the only group of sixth graders in the entire cafeteria. So, obviously, we had to sit together.
It’s like Ashley and I were meant to be best friends. All of the details were arranged purposefully so that we would meet and then be forced to meet again until we were inseparable. I thank God for my broken locker that had to be replaced with the one right next to Ashley’s. I thank God for giving us seventh grade lunch and forcing Ashley and me to sit together. And I thank God for the fact that we were both 55 inches tall in sixth grade and had to line up next to each other on picture day.
SEVENTH GRADE
I’m not entirely sure why I decided to sign up for Graphic Arts in seventh grade. I had been warned. But I liked graphic design, and I knew it would be an easy class, so I did it anyway.
There were two girls in the class, counting me. Every other student was a boy who either didn’t have any hobbies or had computer stuff as his only hobby. Noah, my one friend in the class, was one of the only boys capable of having a decent conversation. We also had science together.
Mr. Lakemen often wore Hawaiian shirts tucked into his dark kakis. We would walk into class every day, and he wouldn’t say anything to us until about fifteen minutes after the bell rang. We were supposed to know what to do already because every day was the same routine.
We were supposed to start class by running Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a computer program that taught us how to type. Fifteen minutes every day of Mavis Beacon telling us to type the same three letter words over and over again until we got to the end of the page.
After typing in silence for fifteen minutes, Mr. Lakeman would finally say something. He had a really soft, sort of high-pitched voice. He would normally tell us to get back to working on PaintShop or PowerPoint or whatever we were doing. Some days he would give us demonstrations. He often took photos of each of us to use for our photo-editing projects. It was really uncomfortable when he selected one of our photos for his demonstrations. He would zoom in on the face, and the boys would snicker.
EIGHTH GRADE
My entire class sat in a circle facing Ms. K, half of us with our mouths hanging open, as she explained the symbolism in Flowers for Algernon and introduced us to the world of literary analysis.
The hourglass Charlie uses in a metaphor for his life, she said, is filled with sand. The window that Charlie mentions watching the children through is made of glass. Glass, in addition to being transparent, is made out of heated sand. Sand represents Time. Time is slipping for Charlie.
How could the writer have meant for all this to be true? I remember thinking to myself. Ms. K was blowing my mind.
That year, Ms. K taught us to practice reading between the lines like I could have never imagined in third grade. The hardest part was differentiating the intentional from the coincidental patterns in the books we read. It was difficult to tell what details were arranged purposefully.
NINTH GRADE
Ninth grade was the year I moved from Texas to Georgia. And with my transition came a lot of comparisons.
The high school I attended for four weeks before moving had a separate building for freshmen that was new and beautiful and, in my hindsight, perfect. Smartboards were in every room. I had only four classes a day. I loved all of my teachers.
And then everything became different. I moved to Georgia.
In Georgia, I had seven classes—one of them being lunch. In Georgia, my school took pride in the fact that they had an hour-long lunch. But I dreaded the 52 minutes of loneliness every day. In Georgia, my school was built in 1958. There was no three-year-old freshmen center.
In Georgia, the math curriculum was integrated. In Texas, I had been in advanced math. The integrated curriculum was different from Texas’ math curriculum. In Georgia, I was in regular math. And I was failing.
In Georgia, I was the new girl. Nobody knew me.
TENTH GRADE
I had been a procrastinator since sixth grade. On Sunday night, I started writing my essay on Of Mice and Men. I began by going over my rough draft, which, I realized, was pretty bad. I knew that in order for my essay to make sense, I would have to do some serious rearranging. So I started out by writing a whole new outline, figuring out what I wanted to say, and organizing my thoughts so that they formulated a thesis. And then I worked well into the night on my essay. And when I finally finished, I grinned. Because I thought it was pretty good.
In the next few weeks, Mr. Jones graded our essays. New assignments came up, and my Of Mice and Men paper slowly faded from my concerns. The year grew more stressful, and with stress came discouragement. And with discouragement came feelings of inadequate-ment. And I was in this sort of inadequate-ment runt when Mr. Jones came up to me after class.
“I don’t know if you’ve considered a career in writing,” he said. And then he went on to say how he had “thoroughly enjoyed” my OMAM paper and was impressed by how I was more adapt to “breaking the molds” than my peers. And I thought I might cry. When I got my paper back, I read his comments over and over. “Very proud of this effort,” he had written. And that made me pretty proud, too.
And I thought about how I had gotten to be the writer I am today. And I thought about how my teachers had always challenged me to try things on my own. And how Ms. Hill and Ms. K taught me to read between the lines. I owe it all to my teachers, the people who may not have known each other, but had all, at some point in time, known me, and had all invested into my abilities and capabilities.
All of the details were arranged purposefully.
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