The end of the innocence

Today in our sunday school class we had to share our favorite school memory as part of one of those get-to-know-you, introductory kind of things.

I kind of expected people to share happy things, but the happy things that happen at school are never the most memorable. So instead of favorite memories, we got the stuck-in-your-head type memories. We heard a variety of barf stories, stories of getting in trouble for things other kids did, stories of being dared to do things and then getting scolded.

I was trying to think of my most memorable school experience. Second grade was a really memorable year for me. I remember we had to sing songs out of these little yellow books every morning, and I hated it. I thought they were "baby songs" and how dare our teacher force seven and eight-year-old children to sing songs that would be more appropriate for preschoolers. I, at the time, was deeply troubled about the state of my soul and worried about the possibility of dying and going to hell. Obviously I had deeper theological concerns than could be addressed by singing about how God loves the little birdies in the trees (I went to a Christian school, natch.)


Mel ponders the Problem of Evil.

I remember practicing printing, too. Our teacher had a specific way of instructing us to form each letter, and one day we were writing lowercase "e." She wanted us to make a "c" and then draw a short line connecting the back of the "c" to the tip to make "e." This is hard to do, especially when you're eight, to get the line to hit the right place, and to be straight.

I'd been making "e" for a long time by that point. I have two of them in my first name alone. So it's not like I didn't know what I was doing. I always made my "e" by starting in the middle: doing the short line first, and then creating the circle "c". I think this is the way that most normal people make "e."

So, everyone was having trouble with this. None of our "e"'s were coming out to the teacher's satisfaction. I always tried to do things the way my teachers wanted me to, because I was a goody-two-shoes like that, but I finally gave up doing it her way and did it my way. Surreptitiously, so she wouldn't know.

And in the end, she came around and told me how nice my "e" looked.

I lost some respect for teachers that day. I realized that they didn't always know the best way to do things, and if you could achieve the results that they wanted, it didn't really matter how you went about doing it.