Bruce Coville gave the Saturday keynote at the New England SCBWI Conference last weekend. If ever you have the opportunity to hear this man speak, do it. I was much too enthralled in his presentation to take notes, but I was intrigued by this exercise he suggested:
Divide a piece of paper into six squares and write everything you can remember about each of your years in elementary school. Who was your teacher? What did the room look like? Who were the people around you? Etc. Etc.
This idea has been niggling at me all week. I am heavy into research reading for two projects at the moment, awaiting critiques of a third, and it seems like a good time to play. And so I spent this morning remembering my childhood. Mr. Coville was right, it is simply AMAZING what an exercise like this will dig up.
Go on, give it a try.
I’ve pasted my elementary revelations behind the cut.
Grade 1
I don’t remember much about first grade. I cannot remember the school, the classroom, or the teacher. I have vague memories of a rectangular cardboard box with a lid and of the hundreds of oaktag letter squares inside; we used them to make words on our desktops. I can see the letters and the box and the desktop. Everything else is blurry and outside the frame of that desktop.
Special note: My mother died during my kindergarten year and I was, as you might imagine, confused for a very long time. Perhaps my Grade 1 memories were lost in the many transitions I was going through?
Grade 2
Lafayette School, Mrs. Ricci
Mrs. Ricci was young and beautiful. She had long, dark hair and coppery skin. She wore a lot of make-up and beautiful gold jewelry: rings, bracelets, earrings, necklaces. The Hawaiian festival was the highlight of the year. There were grass skirts and leis and I drank coconut milk for the first time. I remember a spelling competition in which Mrs. Ricci asked us to spell the word WEDNESDAY. One after another, we second graders trudged to her desk, wrote our guess on a piece of paper, and were sent back to our seats. And then I had the marvelous idea of looking at the wall calendar on my way back to my desk. I raised my hand for a second chance and nailed it. I don’t recall being found out, but I wonder now if Mrs. Ricci knew my secret.
Grade 3
Lafayette School, Mrs. Hurley
Mrs. Hurely was older. She looked and dressed like my grandmother … short gray hair, no-nonsense polyester pants suits. I remember a book report on Judy Blume’s BLUBBER. My copy of the book was red and perfect and wrapped in library cellophane. I was nervous about the report; I was passionate about the book.
Grade 4
Lafayette School, Mr. Kelleher
Mr. Kelleher was handsome and I remember feeling shy whenever I was near him. I was being raised in a house of women (just me, my sister and my aunt); handsome young men were a novelty. Mr. Kelleher had the added intrigue of being a musician. He played his guitar in our classroom weekly and he taught us the words to “Yellow Submarine”. He also taught us to write in cursive, and I remember very clearly the cursive alphabet displayed on the classroom walls. It stretched around a corner, and the traditional horizontal lines of penmanship paper—a solid upper and lower line and a middle one hatched to indicate the proper place to begin and end lowercase letters—were white on green. I remember the day Mr. Kelleher corrected my lowercase p’s because I had made the opening stroke extend all the way to the tippy-top line, and I remember finding my nerve and pointing out to him that I had drawn my p’s exactly the way they were drawn on that green cardboard guide. “I stand corrected,” he told me, and I sang extra-loud that day.
Special note: Mr. Kelleher is now Johnny the K, a children’s entertainer visiting schools and spreading “music with a message” across the land. In a fabulous stroke of good fortune, he visited my sons’ elementary school last fall and I was able to see him touch the lives of a second generation of my family. How cool is that?
Grade 4
Hamilton School, Mrs. Doherty
We moved during my fourth grade school year: same town, new school. My knees were knobbed and scabbed and I thought they looked funny between my girly white ankle socks and my green corduroy jumper dress. I prayed the children couldn’t see them as I stood at the front of the room—Mrs. Doherty’s arm around my shoulder—suffering through my introduction. My seat was the last one in the second row, right next to Joseph Prezioso and not at all close enough to the girl with the brown hair and the dungarees who chatted endlessly to everyone about everything. I wanted that girl as a friend even more than I wanted to move back home. Her name was Kelley
Note: Kelley is now Auntie to my three children, I am Auntie to her three children, and I cannot imagine my life without her. And to think I hadn’t wanted to move!
Grade 5
Hamilton School, Mrs. Lodge
It was 1979, and I remember being greeted on the first day of school by a brightly decorated bulletin board that read: “Welcome Class of 1987”. I was immediately worried. We were being welcomed to fifth grade by a teacher who couldn’t get the year right! I marched up to Mrs. Lodge and told her she had mistakenly welcomed the Class of 1979 as the Class of 1987 and I remember she was kind as she explained it all to me. Mrs. Lodge served jury duty that year and missed what seemed like months of the school year. Our substitute was Mrs. Tringali, and she wrote lovely messages to me in my journal. Oh! And there was a States and Capitals Bee. It was a BIG DEAL, held on Friday afternoon in the school cafeteria. Kelley and I studied hard together. We were the last children standing, and I was thrilled about this … right up until the proctor said “North Dakota” and Kelley shouted “Bismark” and I lost the blue ribbon. I was inconsolable. I think Kelley tried to give me her ribbon, which of course made me cry even more. Mrs. Tringali wrote me a lovely consolation in my journal on Monday, and I wrote back passionately about having ruined her weekend. Oh, the drama!
Grade 6
Hamilton School, Mr. Camello
Mr. Camello was comfortable. He was old (to me), short, and kind. He wore suit coats and a tie every day. We kept a tally on the chalkboard recording the number of days US hostages were held in Iran and I remember wondering if the number would ever stop going up. I became a rebel. I invented a Girls Code so that we gals could write notes to each other and rest assured they would not be deciphered by Boy interceptors. I stole the Boys Code Key from John Guerio’s desk (he sat beside me); they never did figure out how we cracked their code. I wrote my name on a desktop … in pencil … and erased it at the end of the day. I had my first crush; his name was Paul DeVito and he was the sweetest boy I had ever met.
Special Note: Paul is the name I gave the sweet protagonist in my WIP. Hmmm …