Second and Third Grade

I don't remember much about second and third grade. I think this might be because we moved (just across town) in March of second grade, and school wasn't all that important. I was dealing with moving from a court with 13 kids between 4 and 9 (and I was 7) to a court with only two other kids (on boy a year older, and one girl a year younger, both in retrospect who were probably LD). In retrospect, maybe it's a good thing that school wasn't hard for me, because I could see my grades plunging because of my personal struggles.

My second grade was part of an experiment that my school was trying. This was not for educational reasons, but for space reasons, I think. They combined the top half of second grade with the top half of the third grade. Therefore, there was one second grade, one third grade, and one combined room of second and third graders. I wish I remembered more about this now that I am a child development specialist. I remember that they sat us on separate halves of the classroom. When the teacher was teaching the third grade, we second graders were supposed to be working on projects at our desks. I remember that I always tried to sit on the dividing line so that I could listen to the third graders' lessons since I could finish seat work in no time. I remember liking that, but I don't remember learning much. I do know that it was nice not to have to leave my classroom for reading like I had in first grade.

I remember very little about third grade except that I had Sr. Gemma. Sr. Gemma was dying to have me in her class. When I was in kindergarten I would sometimes spend time in the Catholic school teacher's lounge while my mom was doing something for the school. Sr. Gemma would find me and run math problems by me. She said that she couldn't wait to teach me math in third grade. The only thing I remember about third grade was multiplication tables. I remember being so angry because I was the second student to memorize the tables (we did 0-12 in those days). Even worse, my cousin beat me! Oh, I was so angry - just like Dermot gets. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that I earned my last sticker the day after my cousin did, but I remember being so upset with myself. So perfectionism runs through our family.

The bigger issue in second and third grade was getting to school. Before we moved, I only lived a couple of blocks away from the school. Also, this was during the days when all kids walked to school unless they lived too far away. When we moved, I lived .9 miles away from the school. The rule was that you had to live one mile away or more to get to take a bus to school. Believe me, my mom would have made me walk the .9 miles to school if it weren't for the fact that I had to cross a really serious intersection to get to school. If there was no traffic, I'm sure I would have had to walk. The other problem is that my mom has really lousy vision and she's night blind. She was legally blind until I was in first grade. I remember her taking driving lessons and getting her license once she could pass the eye test. When we moved, my parents only had one car and my dad needed that for work. So, my mom didn't have a way to drive me, and on days when it was dark in the morning, she couldn't have driven me anyway. I am pretty sure that a friend of hers with a kid at my school drove my brother and I to school. It's amazing that I don't remember any details about that. Wow, I'm getting old.

In third grade, I think, my mom got an old beater of a car. This is a great story. One of my mom's college friends, who is completely blind, inherited a car from one of her aunts. Since she was married to a blind man and their kids were small, she certainly couldn't do anything with the car. So she sold the car to my mom for some small fee. So we had a beat up blue Gran Torino for my mom to tool around in. Now that she had a car she could drive some times, but she still couldn't if it got dark. This doesn't just mean mornings in the winter. My mom also can't drive if there's any kind of storm that darkens the sky.

Because of the transportation issues, because there were no more nuns teaching at the fourth through sixth grade levels at my school, and because my brother was graduating from my school, my parents decided to let me go to public school at the beginning of fourth grade. That will be my next post. Public school was fantastic for me, but there were some horrible growing pains, especially in fourth grade.