Bad school memory- from light to heavy

mdoc
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:28:20 +0000

My first “bad school memory” is from kindergarten - the field trip to the zoo. The kindergarten teacher split the kids up into groups and each group was to go with a parent chaperone. Somehow I wasn’t assigned to a group. Being an extremely shy 5 year old, I said nothing, just watched the groups walk away and leave me, totally alone, just inside the zoo entrance. I continued to stand there until someone returned for me. Since I wasn’t on the teacher’s group list, I’m not sure how they even realized I was missing. I don’t know how long I stood there (it was probably somewhere between 15 minutes and an hour), but it seemed like all day to me. 44 years later, this is one of very few kindergarten memories I still have.

I also vividly remember the nun I had in third grade, who would drag me around the classroom by the ponytail because she didn’t like the way my hair was fixed (a side ponytail that sometimes flipped into my face). I was scared to death of her and I’d ask my mother to fix my hair a different way, but she didn’t. When I told her about it years later she told me if she’d known why I wanted my hair fixed another way she would have done it, but I was afraid to tell her I was getting in trouble at school (to me, getting dragged around by the hair was “getting in trouble,” even though I’d really done nothing wrong). Some of those nuns were just vicious.