I remember a lot about second grade. The teacher was Mrs. D. (I remember her full name but won’t post it). I’m not sure I would recognize her on the street today, but I probably would have when I was in high school. I remember that her husband was the principal of the middle school a block away, and he came by to visit a few times. Looking back on it, I was the teacher’s pet, but denied it at the time. She held me up as a model student because I was quiet, stayed in my seat, and kept my hands folded. The other kids must have hated my guts, but I don’t remember any repercussions.
The school was only a few blocks from home. I was upset that my mother made me ride the bus, because there was one busy road between. I wanted to be the big kid who walked to school. Our classroom was the second-to-last on the south side of the west wing of the school, across the hall from the gym. The windows looked out over the playground which could be distracting what with other classes having recess while we were supposed to be learning. But it was the big kids’ playground that was only for second- and third-graders, not the baby playground on the other side of the school for kindergartners and first-graders. On the kids’ birthdays, the teacher would playfully spank us, once for each year and one to grow on. I doubt that would be allowed any more. On the first day of school, we were supposed to introduce ourselves. I was surprised how many of the other kids knew and remembered each other from nursery school. I hadn’t attended nursery school myself.
When the teacher tried to teach us how to tell time, I was shocked that there were still kids my age who didn’t know how. She tried to teach us the greater-than and less-than signs, but she did it in such a confusing way that I mixed them up for many years afterward. I distinctly remember her teaching us that adding zeroes to the right side of a number makes it ten times bigger but adding zeroes to the left side doesn’t change it. Most memorably, she said that if the chalkboard were long enough she could continue adding zeroes to the left side all the way to the edge of the woods, and it would still be the same number. I was suitably impressed, because the edge of the woods was hundreds of feet away. I remember that I had a lot of trouble distinguishing letters that are mirror images of each other (b/d and p/q). In January, we watched the inauguration of Jimmy Carter live on TV. I knew what it meant, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. Besides, it was boring.
In the first half of the year, I had one best friend. Strangely, I don’t remember his name. Maybe Chris something. We bonded early in the year over having the same Adam-12 lunchbox. I was upset that he had a matching Thermos bottle and I didn’t. Just before Christmas, his family moved to the next town over and I never saw him again. In the second half, my best friend was Jeff W. We used to play Superman by tying our sweatshirts around our necks and pretending they were capes and running around pretending we were flying. I think that after second grade Jeff got held back. I hardly saw him at all for a couple years after that.
1966-67 Miss Lacy. She was young, just starting out. Which was different than the usual older grandmotherly types teaching. I can remember her look very distinctly. I remember that she was Jewish, which would have been very exotic in our small rural town. But to a kid like me it had no meaning.
I can remember the location of the room, not the room number. I remember Miss Lacy taught us French, I retain some of that teaching. I remember the we used the SRA reading program, which I blasted through in no time.
I remember Jeanine walking in on me while I was in the little bathroom off the corner of the room.
Those are the things I remember from second grade.
I’m always surprised when people cannot remember back to second grade or earlier. I recall the names of all of my teachers, many of my classmates (at least first names), the location of the room and the desk I sat in, and many other salient details back into kindergarten. For those who cannot recall, is early memory just a complete haze and you only have memories going back to a later period, or is it just that you cannot distinguish memories by time period but still recall images and events out of context?
Memory has always fascinated me, particularly its fungibility and mutability, and the more I’ve learned about neuroscience the more amazed I am that we really have very little idea how it works at anything but a conceptual level. It is so fundamental to experience and learning, and when it starts failing or is interfered with by stress or medication, it can be a truly disorienting experience, like waking up with no legs.
During second grade I went to two different schools because we moved over the Christmas break. My first teacher was a pretty young woman named Mrs. Schrag. At Halloween she dressed up as a football player. She was a lot of fun.
My second teacher that year was Miss Aley, a gray haired at forty one years old sourpuss. I was sitting in class one day, reading, and in one story figured out my first word on my own. It was “hiccup” I went up to the teacher to show what I’d done and she snapped at me “We’re not supposed to be that far along yet, go sit down” I was crushed.
About fifteen years ago I met a woman who was the daughter of that first teacher, Mrs. Schrag. She was happy to meet a former student of her mom, because as it turns out she only taught two years. By the time I had her she’d been diagnosed with MS, and took sixteen years to die, ending in a care home. I took a card to the funeral home, saying how I remembered her so pumped up at Halloween. Her husband called me later, and brought over a huge bouquet of flowers from the funeral. They were gorgeous, and he said they’d put the card out at her photo display, as I was someone who remembered her as she’d been before she got sick.
A bit of both. I’m sure I remember things that tool place in second grade, but there is bitching distinctive (as in major life events) to nail down those memories to that particular year. But the memories that I do have are vague snippets in a mostly empty record. I doubt that I have much more than 30 seconds of distinct memories from the first 6 or so years of my life. The rest is just a vague outline of events.
I remember the school, since I lived near there most of my life. I even substituted at that school. I don’t remember any classwork except Phonics. I remember the blue-plaid printing on the cover, and that I liked that subject best because it was so easy. I could already read far above grade level.
I remember the teacher, but only for one thing: the worst moment of elementary school. It was my turn for show-and-tell, and when I get to the front of the class I had a real case of stage fright. I “ummed” a few times and the only kid I remember from K-3rd grade, Joe, with the pale skin, white-blond hair and blue eyes, yelled “Spit it out!” The whole class laughed, and Mrs. B (I know her name but I won’t publish it) didn’t bat an eyelash.
I’ve used that story with my students, telling them that people will remember them for making them feel bad. I would tell them that they probably didn’t want to be like Joe.
Mrs. Taylor was the perfect teacher for me. I was horribly shy and the next year we discovered that i needed glasses. She never made me conspicuous which is the dread of shy kids everywhere. Also the first adult outside of my mother who didn’t give me a ration of shit for not drinking milk. Lactose intolerance was not generally diagnosed in the mid sixties; I threw up a lot. Also hell for a shy kid trying to be invisible.
Mrs Taylor had an aluminum Christmas tree with a colored light wheel in front of it. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She decorated it with cheap ornaments from Woolworths and have each of us one to take home at the break. I got a glass ornament in the shape of a silver bell. Still have it fifty years later.
I was born in 1945, and was in 2nd grade in 1952. I’ve had some wonderful teachers over the years, but I’ll just tell you about my 2nd grade teacher. I don’t think she’d be allowed to teach today. At least I hope not.
Miss G. was painfully thin, and wore the same thing every day: a starched long-sleeved white blouse and an ankle-length straight black skirt. Her brown hair was in little rings, covered by a hair net. Wire-rim bifocals. High black laced shoes. No makeup. No jewelry. Nobody had ever seen her smile.
She was more of a disciplinarian that a teacher. She would give us an assignment every morning, and you wouldn’t be allowed to eat lunch until you were finished with it. I was very meticulous in my work, so most days I ate my lunch in the bus, on the way home.
In the back of the classroom was the “cloak room,” hidden by heavy doors that lifted up, like garage doors. There was neither light nor fresh air in the cloak room. If a student misbehaved, he had to stay in the cloak room until given permission to come back. The rest of us were instructed to ignore any crying or screaming that came from the cloak room.
Another of her favorite punishments was to not allow the kid to go to the restroom, for the rest of the day . . . then ordering the kid into the cloakroom for going in his pants. It wasn’t unusual for all of our coats to smell like piss or shit.
One PTA meeting, Miss G. told our parents that she hated children . . . especially boys.
I wasn’t the only kid who started having nightmares while I was in Miss G.’s class. These nightmares continued for several years.
I think my memory problem is due to the fact that we moved all the time and so I attended a lot of different schools for short periods of time. It would be difficult for me to pinpoint where I was in what years.
Mrs. Hindman. I remember on St. Patrick’s Day she went around the room and kissed the top of the head of the kids who weren’t wearing green. I had a little purse with 4 colored squares, one of which was green, and I pointed this out to avoid the dreaded kiss.
I think this was also the year that all the little girls were wearing super long stocking caps, and recess was pretty much the little girls running around shrieking while the boys yanked their caps off.
Mrs. Shipley was my 2nd grade teacher. She was a friend of my Grandma, so I was a little bit of a teacher’s pet. She could have a nasty temper sometimes, but she was an interesting person. She had taken a trip around the world the summer before I had her, s o she spent a lot of time showing us slides and telling us about her travels. Students in the lower grades didn’t get to visit the library every week; the teachers would select library books for students to pick from. Because I was a future school librarian, or maybe because my Grandma was director of school libraries for the county, I got to go and help her select books. Because so many kids in my first grade class were held back, we had a lot of kids who were repeating first grade.
I remember my teacher’s name, Mrs. Griffith. She was “older” (maybe 50-ish) with shoulder-length iron gray hair. Whatever happened in the classroom during the year I don’t much remember.
However, the other thing I remember is that it was in 2nd grade that I realized that I was gay (not in those terms of course). This realization occurred on the school grounds, while I was waiting with other little kids to be escorted (by older kids, I think) part of the way home at the end of the day.
Mrs. Fiene was our teacher; she’s also been the teacher for many of those in our class when we were in kindergarten.
We were in the second classroom along the hallway (in between the classrooms for first grade, and third grade, of course).
Of a class of roughly 25 or so kids, there were three of us named Mike. Even more strange, all three of us had last names that started with M, so we were “Mike Mi.,” (me), “Mike Ma.,” and “Mike Mo.”.
Early in the school year, Mrs. Fiene determined that I wasn’t being challenged by our classwork. She spoke with my parents, and there was, for a time, some consideration to skip me ahead to 3rd grade. They decided to not to that, but I did wind up doing math with the 3rd graders for the rest of the year.
My teacher was Miss Wilson. She was single, and, in my mind, kind of mean. One day, I overheard my mom talking to another mom, and one of them said something about Miss Wilson needing a boyfriend. It was years before I understood what that meant. I had her again in 6th grade and she had a boyfriend and she was much nicer.
Somethings that stand out:
I remember exactly where my classroom was on campus. First floor of the newer building, first classroom. The door was brown…this is memorable because the other building had doors painted all different colors, but this building all the doors were brown. I can probably name a dozen or more kids who were in my class.
We did a class play about a naughty princess and I played the queen. I remember the names of the people who played the king, princess, and her nursemaid.
I remember there were maybe half a dozen of us who were left handed and she kept trying to get us to write without hooking our hands around. She taped one boy’s wrist with a tongue depressor to keep him from being able to bend his wrist. I’m still friends with this guy.
About 1/3 of the class got chicken pox all the same week. When we got back, the other 2/3 of the class was out. It was weird to have there be like only 10 kids in class.
It’s funny but that’s the one grade in elementary school I don’t have any memories of. I have at least a couple of memories from each of the other grades.
I can remember things from way back, like how much buying lunch from the tuckshop cost and the names of kids from school, but I was in hospital a couple of months ago and I now can’t remember the names of the nurses, some of whom I was seeing frequently. It’s gone. I can’t remember the plots of movies pretty much straight after I’ve seen them, but I can remember some trivia from years ago.
That is so sad, what a horrible disease MS is.
Not second grade, it was later, but 2 of us were allowed not to sit in class during maths. We went out to the playground with these books and were allowed to just do stuff by ourselves. No way they’d be allowed to do that today, just let you go off unsupervised.
I think I was very lucky not to have had any sadistic, nasty teachers when I was in primary school. There was one I remember, but she was just a temporary teacher, not one of the regulars.
Second grade was Ms. Anderson. She was beautiful and wonderful and she made me feel like I was smart and a good student. In first grade I’d been a middle-of-the-pack student with adequate reading skills but in 2nd grade I really took off. (I got addicted to Nancy Drew books and was always carting one around with me).
It was a new school for me; our family had just moved from New Mexico to south Georgia. I had to ride a bus for what seemed like forever, had to be up before the sunrise to catch it. (didn’t like that part). My folks had warned me that I would encounter racism and would be seeing black people and that I needed to know that they were just like us and not to believe anything I heard about them being different or inferior, and so I was quite the enthusiastic race liberal.
I had several friends – Clea, the twins Wanda and Rhonda, Grace, Mike, Billy to an extent. I wasn’t popular but I wasn’t a misfit either.
Marbles – cat’s eyes, “clearies”, the opaque swirly white ones, and “steelies” (ball bearings actually) – were official currency, traded and exchanged to reward favors and cement friendships. Paper “cootie catchers” were used to tell fortunes.
Because my maternal grandmother had begun tutoring me very early in my life I only lasted a few days in first grade. By then my teacher had seen there was nothing new for me there, and she convinced the principal to promote me into second grade. Things went well until my new teacher decided that I absolutely must eat the stewed tomatoes on my lunch tray. Her forced feeding resulted shortly in my first and only experience of projectile vomiting, which (happily) affected most of my table mates in a properly disgusting manner. “Unintended consequences”, don’t you know…
The school was the oldest building in our city school system back then (1958). It closed at Christmas break and students were dispersed to one or two new schools. I remember no other childrens’ names during this period of time.
