Okay, I got the first year of real school out of the way. It was time to start second grade. The first day of school, I walked past my first grade classroom. There was a line of kids waiting to go inside. In that line, I saw someone who was in my first grade class the year before. He had been left back. He looked at me and rolled his eyes. I could tell he didn't want to do the first grade all over again.
When I was in the first grade, one of the first things they taught us was math. We learned stuff like 1+1=2, 1+2=3 and so on. On the first day of second grade, we learned 1+1=2, 1+2=3. What? We learned this last year! Why aren't we learning something new? My father said it's because too many students forget too much stuff during the summer and a review is in order for the first few days of the school year. Well, if that's the case, why did that one guy have to do the first grade all over? Why isn't there some sort of test we can take for those of us who remember everything we learned so we can go on to the next grade?
So, aside from that, second grade was fairly uneventful. It was almost the same as first grade, but we had to stay in class an extra half-hour. I'm just going to move on to third grade.
In third grade, we finally got to do some more advanced stuff. For starters, we learned cursive writing. I will tell you that my cursive writing is absolutely terrible. I always got bad marks because of my handwriting. The teacher kept screaming at me to make the letters like they do in the book. When I got older, I heard it explained that the smarter you are, the worse your handwriting is because your hand is trying really hard to keep up with your brain in writing down your thoughts. This actually made sense as I noticed those who appeared to be the D and F students had the most beautiful handwriting. They seemed to have time to write their words with care. Teachers have to have seen the phenomenon all the time, so I'm surprised that my teacher hollered at me so much about it.
I also want to discuss something that started in third grade and plagued every student in Artesia for this and the next three years. This was the year we learned how to do multiplication and division. While there would be issues with that by itself, the big problem was the new textbooks we received. One thing you need to know is that the State of New Mexico's education program has a special fund that can only be used for getting new textbooks every four years. I would always watch TV sitcoms in which the younger characters would always complain about how their textbooks were 20 or more years old. That bewildered me. We got new textbooks on a regular basis, so I couldn't identify with that.
When I was in first and second grades, our math books were designed to give the main lesson on a few pages and then we would do the problems written in the book, tear those pages out and give them to the teacher. I know that there were similar books for the third and fourth grades because I had seen them. But when I got to the third grade, we got these thick books that were published by Harcourt Brace and Holt. These did not have pages that you could tear out. Now, the books included the lessons on a few pages, followed by a page with problems on it. We were supposed to copy the problems onto a piece of paper and solve them. That wasn't the problem. The issue was that the font size was very small and included all the problems in as many as 10 or more columns and rows. The teachers would assign the entire class to complete one page of the problems without realizing they had just assigned 100 problems or more. (And these are supposed to be math teachers). Now, I'm smart, and it would take me about 15 seconds to solve each problem. That means I could do it all in about a half hour. Now, imagine that it takes a below average student at least a minute to solve each problem. Add to that that they were required to re-write the problem from the book, which we didn't have to do before. They would be working on that single page for almost two hours or more. It's no wonder a lot of students could not stand math. It was more work than it was worth. The fact that the whole four years that I used those books, I never once saw a teacher assign less than the full page means they weren't paying attention to the havoc they were creating and were probably wondering why so many students just did not do very well.
We didn't get new books until the 7th grade and I was so relieved to see we got a much thinner math book with fewer problems. However, by that time, calculators became more prominent. If we had had calculators in the 3rd grade, we would have more students able to whiz through their homework.
The third grade was also the first time I got in trouble with the principal. A fellow student had asked me to watch his jacket. After waiting awhile, I kind of felt put upon and threw the jacket over the school fence into the bushes on the other side. He told the teacher and we had to go to the principal's office. The principal made me go around the fence and through the bushes to get the jacket. He then gave me a spanking with his paddle. He didn't hit me nearly as hard as my dad did. It wasn't even punishment.
As you can see, my first three years in school were really not very eventful. No, the fun didn't start until the fourth grade. We'll get to that in a later blog post.
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