Well, the kindergarten thread is going well, so I guess it’s time to advance a grade.
Sorry for non-US Dopers, I don’t know what the equivalent to 1st grade is around the world. In the traditional US educational system, this is your first year of complusory education, though that is changing now with a lot of places requiring kindergarten.
I’ll start:
After considerable deliberation (and re-reading my original post in which I specified that this did not have to be one’s happiest memory), I’ll have to say that my favorite memory from 1st grade was of watching the class psycho hide under a desk, hoarding the little red discs we used as counters when studying math, and spewing obsceneties at our teacher, Mrs. Dixon. I don’t mean stuff like “Go away, meanie” either, I mean the kind of language I normally associate with divorces and Joe Pesci movies. Four-, five-, and a couple of twelve-letter epithets burst out of this six-year-old heathen like watermelon seeds off a front porch in August. By the time he was done with his verbal assault, the rest of the class was either sitting in stunned silence or vainly trying to keep a straight face (the two or three of us who understood what he was saying).
Mrs. Dixon was a saint through all of this, and calmly managed to get him extricated from his den and promptly marched him to the principal’s office. This was back when going to the principal’s office meant that you were going to get spanked, and they wanted to save you the embarrassment of having your classmates see it happen.
Sadly, I did not learn my lesson from this event and wound up spending most of the next several years of my life hanging around with this felon-in-training.
My friends and I were walking home from school one day and it seemed everyone had a great story to tell but me. So I told them that my grandfather’s church had been blown up by a bomb (Grandpa was a Finnish Apostolic pastor). I have no idea why I said that - this was 1962 and I don’t recall ever having heard about anything BAD being done to churches then. And evidently I didn’t think about the consequences (like Mom would hear about this). Well, of course Mom got all sorts of phone calls expressing sympathy and she had to explain that her youngest was a liar. This resulted in one of the few spankings I had as a child.
And I swallowed a dime. I hated using pockets (still do) and I had this dime to buy some watermelon. So naturally I put it in my mouth and went to play on the jungle gym at recess. gulp Holy crap, I was scared. I told Mom (also had a tendency not to tell her when things hurt, but this scared me) and she spent the next couple of days looking though my poop for that dime. I think she pretended to find it to assuage my fears.
I answered your kindergarten thread, Knead, but I’ve realized that I don’t have a single memory from first grade. I assume I wentto first grade–I can’t see how I could have gotten out of it–but I don’t remember even the tiniest detail. It’s kind of strange.
I remember where I went through a cat phase, where I acted like a cat. Everyone called me “cat girl” and stuff. I would only draw cats, too. I couldn’t draw people. One time I had to write a story based on pieces of paper I took out of a hat. I had to write a story about a fat man on a raft going to McDonalds. I would not draw a man, so the teacher said I could draw a fat cat instead. the kid sitting behind me, Billy, was drawing a Ninja Turtle and needed my red crayon, so I gave it to him, and he returned it, half chewed up. And the welf was happy.
I also had a friend named George that gave me a coin with a cat on it. I cherish that coin to this day.
One time when reviewing Math, we turned to a page with colorful pictures of tropical birds. I loved animals, and acting like an animal (I was convinced that I wasn’t human) so I got put in the corner for making bird noises. Hey, I couldn’t resist! I’m a vocal welf!
Making my first school-friend. I don’t remember having any friends in kindergarten, but I joined the class mid-way through the school year. Anyway, in 1st, I sat next to a girl named Carla. I thought she was really pretty. She had brown eyes and dark brown hair, while I was blue-eyed and had light brown hair. I asked her if she would sit by me at lunch and we got to be friends. I later got a doll for Christmas that had brown eyes and hair and named her Carla, after my friend.
Hey, that’s cool, MysterEcks, just hang around. I’m going to have trouble coming up with anything to start off the sixth grade thread when we get there.
Mine is much like Brachs’. That’s one active imagination, Brach.
In my day, the 70’s, before schools were very P.C., every Friday one of the kids parents would come in and tell us about their job. They’d give and brief speech, do a Q & A, and leave. About five minutes in all.
Being a tot I never really understood what my father did in actual life. So, the week before my dad was going to address the class, I decide to inform the class that my father is a decorated fighter pilot. The kids loved it. I have to admidt I liked the attention. They anxiously waited for his arrival.
As reckoning day approached, I came up with more and more maladies that made me unable to attend school. It finally came, however, and I couldn’t hold out any longer. I had to go and my father was going to drive me.
He goes before the class and begins a lengthy speech describing his job and what he does day in and day out. My peers looked at me with stunned silence, dissapointment, and much anger. My father, the trooper that he is, kept on going the whole five minutes giving vivid accounts of things he’s done and seen. It was a Helluva speech. He was thanked with a smattering of applause. To this day, I still think he is dissapointed with the reception he got from my class.
I remember lots of things from first grade.
I remember having a little friend named Frankie. He was short and kinda chubby with bright red hair. I didn’t have many girlfriends back then. All my friends were guys and I had a crush on a guy named Michael. I remember his last name because I still have my yearbook from back then. I also remember always wearing my hair up in pigtails and once, I wore my hair down and a guy named Richard walked up to me and said “I didn’t know you had long hair”.
Oh,Monster, I also remember those boards. They were so much fun.~Lisa
I remember getting stepped on by a third grader. Seriously. My buds and I were playing a game of some kind on the playground and I fell down on my back. A third grader, the oldest grade in my building, was running along and landed right on my stomach. It’s the only time I can remember being winded. To add insult to injury (no pun intended), I had to walk up an enormous hill to get to the teachers on top and recieve medical attention.
I remember “discovering” I could talk to birds. This means, I would stand on top of the huge hill on the playground and screech, caw and tweet into the air. If I was lucky, a crow would call to another crow. Only being in first grade, I’d think the crow was talking to me. Thankfully, this only lasted one year.
I remember eating the honeysuckle sap that grew over the stone wall that kept the potato-headed kids from the woods behind the playground. We got in trouble a lot for doing that.
First grade holds the first memories of mine of going to a lot of teachers meetings. My mom was the third grade teacher in my school. (It was a private school, so that explains a lot) I learned a lot of dirty little secrets about my classmates.
Mrs. Akroosh was my first grade teacher. She was beautiful and I remember having a crush on her. She had long wavy black hair and I wanted touch it. Sammy was the popular boy in class. He had long bangs that kept falling in his face. Everyday Mrs. Akroosh would take a bobby-pin from her hair and pin his back. She would tell him that he had beautiful eyes and she wanted to see them.
When I was in 2nd grade she died of cancer. I remember how sad it made me feel even though I didn’t really understand the concept of death.
My favorite memory of first grade was getting ice cream at afternoon recess EVERY day! You could choose between three flavors. This may not sound like much, but there were five kids in my family and my parents were farmers. To us kids it was a real big deal to get ice cream. It was a special treat.
Now I must come up with a different story for my 2nd grade thread! (I told my class that my dad was a police officer. I obviously lacked your advanced skills at truth-engineering.)
Well, at the time it didn’t seem so great, but my best memory is the fact that all the girls in 1st grade used to chase me all over the playground. When they all caught me they’d push me down on the ground and then they’d all kiss me. Of course it was BLECHY at the time, but I sure as hell wish I could go have that all over again (no, I don’t mean I’m a pedophile, but it was pretty cool just to get all that attention).
First grade was a tough year. I had one of those teachers that just didn’t seem to like children much. My major difficulty that year was caused by the fact that I am ambidextrous. I had yet to choose a hand to write with, and would switch back and forth. This irritated her, and she would attempt to force me to use my right hand only. Apparently, I also had some form of dyslexia (though I grew out of it) and would write entire sentances in mirror writing. The letters were backwards and went from right to left, so that they could be read if held up to a mirror. This didn’t thrill her either. After meeting with her, my father (also a teacher) sat me down and explained that some people just weren’t very good at teaching and I would just have to get through the year the best I could. And yes, at 6 years of age, I understood this.
My most powerful memory from that year was of a (several years older) neighborhood bully who decided one day that it would be fun to hold straight pins between his fingers and punch me in the arm. I got off the bus trying to hide my tears, but couldn’t pull it off and had to confess to the teacher. We went to the principal’s office, where my sleeve was rolled up to reveal the damage. His parents and mine were called in. I was terrified of the payback I was sure to receive for “tattling.”
Somehow it is the things that upset me that I remember the most…
I remember getting an “N” on a coloring assignment. The grades were from S+ (best) through S, S-, N and U.
N meant it needed to be redone.
It was a bowl of apples and we were supposed to color it. I colored mine yellow and green.
When I got my paper back and Mrs. Thompson had put an N on it, she told me it was because apples were red.
My mom called her up and chewed her out, and left my drawing on the fridge for a couple of weeks. My mom must have won the argument, because I did not have to redo the assignment.
To quote robinh, Mrs. Thompson was “one of those teachers that just didn’t seem to like children much.”
I had her again for 4th grade.
She also wouldn’t let us throw away Kleenex after one use. She wanted us to save them and reuse them. It wasn’t like she was trying to get us to conserve school resources, either. Part of the supplies we were required to bring from home was a box of Kleenex for our desk.
Another thing my mom called her up and chewed her out about.
On a happy note, though, my best friend in 1st grade was named Tracy. She was an only child, and I remember going to her house to play a lot because she had tons and tons of toys.
My memory from first grade is being divided up into reading groups according to reading level. I was in the highest reading level group, the ones that could read before starting school. Those books were the first place I ever heard the name “Meg”. None of the kids in the group knew how to pronounce it. Surely, we thought, no one could be actually named “Meg”. I have no idea why I remember that so vividly.
Sorry, to anyone named Meg. It was kind of a small town, and most of the girls were named Jennifer or Cindy. I know it’s a very normal name now.
I’d learned to read before first grade, but my teacher must have thought she’d performed a miracle in getting me to read so easily. I remember reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears to the teacher, then she had me go read it to the principal.
We played tag during recess, boys against the girls. I was being chased, and I slipped taking a sharp turn, getting a bloody nose in the process.
In weirder things, I also threw up at lunch every day for awhile. I asked my mom many years later if she knew why. She said that I was hungry when I got home, so she did some investigating. She asked the teacher what the lunch routine was like, and the teacher ran through the list. Kids in line, march out, lock the door, go to the cafeteria. Mom told her to tell me that locking the door was to keep any bad kids out while we were away, that she had the key and we would get back in after lunch. It must have worked.
I know it’s a very normal name now.