Nerd Beginnings pt. 1

I never attended preschool.  To be honest, I don’t think that my mother was informed of what preschool was.  Before she went to work, she always made sure that I had plenty of pencils and paper in the house.  You get restless being a four year old at home alone for eight hours.  The PBS shows served as my preschool.  My mom expected to see what I had learned for the day when she got home.  Addition and subtraction tables, the letter of the day and basic words, and doodles.  Anytime I asked my mom to draw with me, she did.  She would always draw the same thing...A bird in a sky full of clouds with the sun shining through them.  It looked like something from Simon in the Land of Drawings.

I was five years old when I entered kindergarten.  I was so excited and nervous to finally start school.  My birthday is September 13th.  Back then you had to have turned five years of age by September 1st, so I actually was a little past the cutoff.  My mom had to pull off a Danny Ocean type caper to get me in.  She had put some things including our school clothes on layaway.  It was never much; I had two new outfits and my brother George’s hand-me-downs to fill the week.  When she finally made the last payment and brought them home, I was bursting at the seams.  My brother and I shared a room in those days.  I scanned the selection and pieced together a first day fit fit for fashion week.  That’s how it felt at the time anyway.  I only got one pair of shoes then.  They had to last from September to September.  They were Pro WIngs (the Payless Shoe Store brand), but to me, they were as fresh as a pair of Off-Whites.  Those were the days when a new pair of shoes made you run at light speed.  I couldn’t walk into our room without a stop and stare pause into what was hanging in the closet.

We lived about two miles or so from the school. My mom walked me on the morning of the first day.  “You know your way back?”

“Yes mom.  I’m good.”

I walked to and from school every day afterward.

Kindergarten was everything that I hoped it would be.  Mrs. Butler took care of us like we were her own.  I made some friends.  I was a star student.  It was a break from being at home.  I loved it.

The month of May rolled around which meant the end of, if I must say so myself, an absolutely stellar kindergarten year.  (I have a school picture somewhere at my mom’s house where I wore a patchwork blazer with a Charlie Brown shirt underneath---That shit was fire!)   Quandary...I wasn’t looking forward to summer vacation.  It seemed like an eternity then.  I couldn’t wait for September.  Fall has always been my favorite time of the year and it has almost everything to do with the start of school.  I was assigned to Ms. Shenk’s first grade class.  She was different from Mrs. Butler.  Where Mrs. Butler had a very nurturing grandma quality about her, Ms. Shenk was a bubbly beautiful blond with fun aunt energy.  I only had a few friends from kindergarten who were with me.  I’m an introvert which made me an extremely quiet kid in class.  I really dislike attention so I did as much as I could to be invisible.

Ms. Shenk would try to poke and prod to get me to open up.  Nope.  You’re cool and all but that’s not going to work lady.  Life had already taught me a few lessons.  One of those lessons is that quiet is better.  Toward the end of the first week, she conducted the lexile level assessment.  That’s the old school reading grouping test.  You remember those groups...the Yellow Birds, the Red Birds, and the Blue Birds.  I didn’t notice it for what it was then but what a dick move.

She had a little circular table adjacent to her desk.  One by one, she made her way down the roster alphabetically.  A student was called and sat in a chair at the table.  She had a piece of paper in her hand, but I had no idea what was actually on it or what she was doing with it.  She had the class working on arts and crafts on the far side of the room.  We were in the first grade so let me just tell you that Rodin and Picasso we were not.    “Lee, it’s your turn.”  (I was way too shy to correct people on the pronunciation of my name, so I went through elementary school as Lee.  Tragic.)  The piece of paper was a list of words.  The words were organized in columns increasing in difficulty top to bottom, left to right.  It was go time.

She gave me the sheet and asked me to read the first column.  To quote the great Ed Lover, “C’mon Son!”  I breezed through it but still really didn’t grasp what was going on.  She asked me to read the second column.  Easy Peasy.  On to the third column.  Knocked it out like Glass Joe in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.  Ms. Shenk started to light up.  “Good job Lee.  Now let’s see how far you can go.”  (I still cringe when people call me Lee.)  Fourth, fifth, sixth column...It was like the cafeteria scene in Oliver Twist.  “Please, may I have some more?”

She asked me to flip the sheet over.  Word after word, I gobbled them up like that hungry, yellow guy.  When I finally stopped, I looked up.  There was an expression on her face that was something between confusion and amusement. I would imagine that it was due to how quiet I had been in her class to that point.

“Do you know the meaning of those words as well?’

“Yes ma’am.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.  I just do.”

She told me that she was going to call my mother later that evening.  I thought I was in trouble.  It was going to be the first call home from one of my teachers.  My mom answered but I had to be there to translate.  Ms. Shenk asked if my mother could come in for a conference.  I was really on edge at that point.

My mom asked, “What did you do?!”

“I don’t know Ma.”

“Okay.  We’ll see.  You better not have.”

I walked to school as I usually did.  My mother was going to meet with Ms. Shenk at 3:30.  (Another dick move to torture me and schedule the conference after school.  Just sayin’.)  I was as anxious as a late intern who drank a Big Gulp sized mug full of coffee on a hot morning looking for a restroom only to see an out of order sign.

“Mrs. McWhorter, I need to speak to you about Lee and his recent reading test score.” 

Expecting the worst, my mom glared at me, looked up at Ms. Shenk with a forced smile and said, “Okay.”

“Because he tested so high, I want to give him another test.  If he scores like I anticipate that he will, I would advise that he skip my class and be placed in the second grade.  With what I have to do to teach the rest of the class, I really can’t do much for him.”

“Okay.”  She looked at me and asked, “This is good, right?  Leeya, Is this something that you want to do?’ (Here’s another little juicy tidbit.  My mother, because of her accent, called me Lee-ya.  I have issues, man.)

Not much more of a conversation between us at that point.  It was two-minute drill tempo and all of us agreed.  I took the test and said goodbye to Ms. Shenk and my classmates.  I was in the first grade all of two weeks.  And just like that, off to the second grade I went.