My Bio - The Elementary Years

Mrs. Whistle was my grade 3 teacher. Once she said “bosh.” That’s a pretty funny word when you’re in grade 3. Trouble was, she said it to me. And she didn’t think it was funny. She was scolding me at the time, about the fact that I’d copied the questions on the math test. Not good. Don’t write the questions she’d said. But I guess I was confused, or distracted. I wrote the questions. And Mrs. Whistle wasn’t so happy. She was standing there yelling at me, and she said “… and you go and write all this bosh! which doesn’t make sense!… blah blah blah!…” And my friend DS whispered “bosh!” and started snickering. But I had to hold the laugh inside until it was safe.

She forgot me, Mrs. Whistle. I think she forgot everyone. Most teachers didn’t forget you, but once she’d done with you, you were history for Mrs. Whistle, and she had no recollection of you.

No so my grade 1 teacher, Mrs. UnreasonableRedhead. She got mad at me because I counted on my fingers. Once she sent me to the principal’s office.

The principal was Mrs. Perfume. She was very strict. Everyone was afraid of Mrs. Perfume. She was very thin. She had a sister who taught French in the high school. The sister was very unthin and her name was The Armoured Truck. But Mrs. Perfume was very thin.

She didn’t know why I’d been sent to her. That’s what I remember, anyway. I could be wrong. It was a very long time ago. Thing was, I hadn’t finished my arithmetic paper. That happened a lot. So finally Mrs.UnreasonableRedhead sent me off to the principal. I don’t know what she was trying to accomplish. Neither did Mrs. Perfume.

She didn’t forget me, Mrs. UnreasonableRedhead, not for years. She had a guilt complex about me. Good.

I was in the A class. Well, not in grade 1. In grade 1 it was all mixed up, while they sorted it out. Then I was in the A class grade 2 through grade 5. They had an A class, a B class, and a C class. It was all hush hush. It wasn’t on paper anywhere. Nobody talked about it. Nobody admitted it. But everyone knew it. The A class was the smart kids. The C class was the dumb kids, and the B class was the not so smart but not so dumb kids.

So I was in the A class notwithstanding my deficient mathematical skills. But then sometime before grade 6 I fell asleep. And so in grade 6 they put me in the B class and I wasn’t happy. I guess I was humiliated. What bothered me at the time was that I was leaving my friends behind. Looking back, it seems odd, that, because I’d had no friends – not really. I was more left out then not.

So there I was in grade 6, in the B class, and unhappy. I had a meeting with the principal. He assured me that I was not being demoted. He said it was a matter of space. They needed to move students around because there were too many students in the class. Funny, they chose me to move, no one else.

Academically, there was no question. I had become a hopeless screw up, daydreaming the day away and blowing all my tests, not handing things in, not doing homework etc etc.

But once I was settled, hey. I started making friends. That was new. Friends. There was Joel Beard, we were inseparable for that year. There was Jerry Hoodlum. He smoked Kools in grade 6. There was Z. A real character he was, introduced me to Hendrix and Cream. I learned cool stuff, like how to cheat on tests. The teacher’s name was Mrs. Toil. We gave her a nervous breakdown. She actually had the breakdown a few months into the next school year. But we primed her, so we get credit.

I did well in grade 6, at the beginning. The academic level was lower than what I was used to. I picked up on that right away. So I did well. Until I got involved with the aforementioned cast of characters. Then things started to slip.

There was an Israeli girl in our class. Her name was Nurit. After hearing her talk a few times I could imitate her accent exactly. So when we had a substitute I pretended that I was Israeli. Most guys around me kept a straight face while I stood up and spoke in the fake accent. But Brian KooKoo, he couldn’t stop laughing. Lucky he was facing me and not the teacher.

Mrs. Lenin was my grade 4 teacher. She said you will not remember me, or maybe you will just remember that I was the teacher who made you read. It’s true, she made us read. I read Treasure Island. Took me all year. She said “ducky.” Isn’t that just ducky, she’d say. And nix. I still say nix, and that’s why. Because my grade 4 teacher did it. The secret’s out…

My Bio - The Early Years

I was the only one of my siblings to attend nursery; I was too active for my mother, something like that – she had to get me out of the house. My siblings, let it be known, are all girls, so I have sisters, so of course they were easier. We all know that girls are easier than boys.

My older sister, though, really would have gone to nursery but for the fact that it didn’t exist then, so my mother sent her to kindergarten a year early, as a result of which she was a year older than her classmates from then on.

That, however, is not my problem.

I went to nursery, then to kindergarten, and I had the same teacher, Mrs. Z, for both years. And there was a second teacher that I vaguely recall, or a teacher’s aide maybe, Mrs. Tissue, something like that, my memory could be imperfect in regard to her actual name. I think she was older than Mrs. Z anyway, but maybe she wasn’t. I was small myself, so my perspective wasn’t perfect.

I could read, I’m not sure when I learned, but certainly in kindergarten I could read. My sister taught me, the same sister that was a year older than all the classmates, that sister, which makes sense because she is older than I am.

Let me say here that my sister is older than I am. When she taught me to read, she was 4 years my senior. Now she is just senior…

She taught me to read, and she taught me phonetically. In grade one, the teacher taught my classmates to read. She did not teach me, because I knew how already. But I observed that she did not teach reading phonetically, that is she did not teach the actual sounds of the letters, she taught holistically, by words. This says “cat,” this says “dog,” this says “holistic.” I didn’t get it. How will any one learn to read that way, I wondered. I still wonder. Some of my class mates went on the become doctors, I can’t prove that they ever learned to read.

I knew how to read in kindergarten. I was one of two such students, the other being IM. There was a difference though. IM publicized his knowledge; I did not publicize mine. I kept quiet, which I think was characteristic of me in those days. The teacher did not know that I could read. I did not tell her, nor, interestingly, did my parents.

I think that my parents knew that I could read then. I think so.

I wonder….

This is what I remember. It was the last day of kindergarten, and we went to the zoo. I remember going to Aunt Sally’s Farm, which was a kind of petting zoo wholly with the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg. Aunt Sally’s Farm disappeared years and years ago, though it may have been revived, and I say that based on the results of googling “Aunt Sally’s Farm Winnipeg.”

Well on the way to the zoo, or on the way back, we were in the car, because that’s how we got to and from the zoo, in cars, and I was reading the signs, and I was reading them out loud: “Stop,” “Yield,” “no parking,” “men with hats crossing,” etc. And the teacher, with whom I was privileged to be in the same car, noticed. VSLP can read! She said. The last day of school and we find out that VSLP can read! I remember that. I was 6.

Another thing I remember about kindergarten. IM, the reader, and his friend PR. they used to steal my hat every morning before class, and toss it back and forth, and not give it back, and I would run back and forth trying to recover my hat, though I may have given up at some point, I don’t remember. I told my father about this, and his response was tell them I said not to.

I did that, you know. My father says don’t take my hat, I said. Oh! They said. Let us give it back right away they said! No, they didn’t. They did not say that. It made no difference to them whatsoever. They continued to torment me, until one day one of them said, I think it was PR, he said let’s give back his hat. And that was the end of that episode.

That’s it really. I will just share this one more bit of trivia. I got a ride to school, and I got a ride home. And we had some kind of arrangement to take other kids home. One was DK, and he would take the snow brush, because we live in Canada so our Car has an implement which on one side has a brush for snow, and on the other side has a scraper for ice, and he would take this thing, and my sister was in the car, not my older sister, because she was in school, grade 5, but my younger sister, the next younger one, because my most youngest one did not exist, and he would take this brush, and say, with glee, let’s brush her face!

And so my sister would whine and complain, she was very small, about 2 I guess, because she did not like to have her face brushed. And my father, who was driving, wasn’t crazy about it, and he’d say something like stop that. And so I guess we’d stop it. And when I say we, I mean he would stop it, because I had nothing to do with any face brushing activities. I was too busy reading the traffic signs…

Postscript: I googled IM, PR, and DK. The only one I found was IM, and he is a professor somewhere, and there is a picture of him wearing a hat.