Nerd Beginnings pt. 2

What can I say about Mrs. Jones... She reminded me of Paula Deen without the racism.  She made my move into the second grade relatively seamless in what could have been a horribly traumatizing experience.  I don’t know if I would have handled that transition without her.  Being the short kid is one thing (I lived on the front row of class pictures), but being the short, biracial, nerdy kid who just skipped a grade felt something that I can only describe as the components to a song by The Cure---minus the hairspray.  That’s what my anxiety was telling me anyway.  It turned out to be a completely different experience.

The students were warm and welcoming.  Mrs. Jones must have prepped the class about my arrival in the previous days.  Do y’all remember school boxes?  The kids these days have streamlined plastic pencil cases that look like they were made by Elon Musk.  Our boxes were clunky thick cardboard boxes that looked like the Model T.  In your box, which fit nicely in your cubby underneath your desk, was:  Elmer’s Glue (if you had paste, your parents had low expectations for you), safety scissors, Crayola crayons, pencils (if you were rocking with the Husky pencils, your parents had low expectations for you), and the spoiled kids had the fancy, scented markers (like for real…why did the black marker have to smell like that?!). So let me tell you about my class. All of them had scented markers and they all shared them with me. I had a blast that year.  Except for Coach Ortega:  our PE teacher.  She was the third meanest lady I had met to that point in my life.  My mom of course the GOAT.  The second was my next door neighbor.  She barked when kids walked on the sidewalk in front of her house.  She would absolutely lose her shit when a ball bounced off our shared chain-link fence when we were playing in our front yard.  Even her raggedy ass dog was in on it...always snitching on us.  That being said, Coach Ortega turned out to be okay.  More than okay.  It took me a while, but I came to understand why she came off that way.

Thank God for Mrs. Jones.  More than anything, she helped me adjust to dealing with an uncomfortable, unexpected move.  She also gave me a safe place to recognize and embrace my inner nerd.

I finished my first two years of school and I had another 3 month long summer break.  Everyone usually looks forward to the summer.  I didn’t.  Simple rule, my dad’s rule:  be home by time the street lights came on.  I would wolf down a bowl of cereal and leave the house as early as possible.  There were days when I would make it back home on time.  Mostly, I didn’t.  The ten minutes of getting my ass whooped was worth not having to be there.

Mrs. Martin was my third grade teacher.  She was absolutely delightful.  If pumpkin spice latte was a person, it would be Mrs. Martin.   This was the year when I noticed girls were cute, became fluent in multiplication and division, and suffered my first criticism from a teacher.

It was our introduction to cursive.  Yes new kids, we were taught cursive.  We had a tablet (a tablet was bound sheets of paper, not an Ipad) where we worked the letters of the alphabet in cursive, a focus on one letter each day, and a list of words that began with that specific letter.  Homework was given every night to write each word a given number of times.  Yes new kids, we had homework.  Mrs. Martin returned my homework one day and it stated that it needed improvement.  Needs improvement!  What?!

I was devastated.  Do you remember Ralphie’s reaction to his C+ in A Christmas Story?  School was so easy to that point, how could I have possibly done something that was less than exemplary?  I went home with feelings of confusion and hurt which turned into anger and focus.  I asked my brother for one of his old notebooks.  There was always scrap paper in the back of old notebooks.  Who has ever gone through a whole notebook?  I practiced page after page, over and over again until there were no more hitches and the ink rolled out of my pen on paper as smoothly as a Michelle Kwan on ice.

Them:  “Why is your handwriting so pretty?   You write like a girl.”  Me:  “Thank you.  I appreciate it.”  My handwriting is something in which I take a lot of pride.  Seems like it would have been an insignificant thing, but it reinforced the value of difficulty and practice.  I needed it.  It was the biggest lesson that I took away that year and I have Mrs. Martin to thank.