2nd grade was the year I stopped being new at school (they didn’t have kindergarten where I lived) and started being good at it. Mrs. Serafino was my teacher - a nice older woman who would help me with arithmetic after school. It was the first time we were allowed to go to the school library, and I kept grabbing books meant for higher grades. It got to the point where I had to give a kind of a book report every time I wanted a book for a higher grade level, to show I actually knew what I was reading. By the end of the year I had made it to the 8th grade level.
I’m surprised by how many people remember their teachers’ names…I remember the name of my first grade teacher, probably because it was the first grade, and 2 JROTC teachers from high school, because I spent 4 years with them in class, after school, traveling, etc…and that’s basically it, I can’t remember any more with any certainty from K-12.
(Come to think of it, I can only remember the names of maybe 1-2 from 4 years of college on top of those.)
Ah, second grade. I remember it as the grade where I was in the “Slow Learners” box (not an actual box; it was on the chalkboard) almost every single day. My teacher was really nice, very sweet lady, but she just could not understand how I never knew where we were in the book. Then we had a test, and suddenly I was in third grade (this was the middle of the year).
Now the thing is that I lived in a state where, owing to my birthday, I didn’t start kindergarten until I was six. And then I finished kindergarten and all of first grade at a base school in Germany. So at the point where I started second grade, in Oklahoma, I had already learned all the stuff they were learning at the beginning of the year, in first grade. And I was older than some of the kids, but not all of them. So the boost into third grade was not all that big a deal, except I got to learn to write in CURSIVE.
However, the second grade teacher was really nice (although boy was she surprised that I made such a great score on that test; she really thought I was slow), I had lots of friends in second grade, and the third grade teacher was mean and had BO like you wouldn’t believe. So I generally feel like I missed second grade and shouldn’t have been moved.
It’s trivial for me to remember the names of all my grade school teachers. And I’m a visual, not verbal person. I even had 3 different teachers during 4th grade. I remember them all.
It’s the high school ones that are harder to remember due to having 5+ of them each year. But I still remember the names of quite a few. Shoot, I remember the name of the Social Studies student teacher from senior year.
I remember I was taller than my teacher.
I don’t remember her name but she was apparently a tiny woman and I was on my way to 6’4".
I remember my teacher, a gray-haired woman named Mrs. Holmes. When I was in first grade, she had a reputation of being “mean,” but it turned out she just had a stern demeanor. She was actually quite nice if you behaved and did your work.
I also remember that everyone was assigned a book from the class bookshelf based on their reading abilities. Mine was a book about a mouse who was a detective like Sherlock Holmes. (I just looked it up and it was “Basil of Baker Street” by Eve Titus.)
A not-so-'nice memory was that on Valentine’s Day, one very unpopular girl had most of her valentines ripped up by the recipients and thrown on the floor by her desk. I was one of the few kids that didn’t, even though she had called me “walnut-head” once, (my address was on Walnut St.)