Elementary Backtrack

[Timmy8271 0]

Ya I pretty much got that too. All i remember is S, U and I.

[BUTT 0]

Man, I never got to watch Channel One like all of y'all. Nor did we ever do that "Cable in the Classroom" shit that Nickelodeon was always advocating. I sure would have liked to have been able to watch Mr. Wizard's World or Nick News W-5 but NOO, we got to produce our own lame-ass version of news.

 

Actually, screw that. The news thing enabled us to take a trip to Harrisburg and Gettysburg in 5th grade. We all got to interview people in the PA state Capitol building. My best friend interviewed Tom Ridge's wife. That was a pretty big deal at the time. I got to interview some dude's secretary. I don't remember who, nor do I care. We also visited the U.N. that year. I wonder if the dudes at the Pit would be upset by that. THEY'RE INDOCTRINATING THE CHILDREN BY BY BRINGING THEM TO A BASTION OF ANTI-AMERICANISM. God, 5th grade was awesome. Except for when I lost the spelling bee. My peak years were ten and eleven, no doubt. It's all been downhill from there.

[Jingus 0]

"Got to watch Channel One"? We were forced to. Nobody liked that shit.

 

And yeah, same here with the weird letter grades in earlier elementary school. I think it was something like E for excellent, A for acceptable, but I dunno, I went to a few different elementary schools and it was a looong time ago.

[Bruiser Chong 0]

We didn't have F's. We had E's.

[Copper Feel 0]

We were graded on a system of 1 - 5 at my primary school, but that was a national thing. Lowest possible grade was 1C, highest was 5A.

 

I pulled off a couple of 5C's in English. I recall that the first one was in the first test we ever did. Its subject matter was advertising a backpack.

[Maztinho 0]

Did anyone else not have the typical A to F grading system in elementary school? Until fourth grade, I guess they thought those letters carried too much of a stigma and would hurt the kids's feelings or something, so we got...different letters!

 

The school's K-3 grading system was:

 

O - outstanding

S+ - I can't remember exactly what this stood for but it was a step up from satisfactory

S - satisfactory

I - improvement needed

U - unsatisfactory

 

I never got a U! But I did get I's in art and behavior in third grade.

 

We had those for behavior subgrades, like Pays Attention, Plays Well with Others, type rulings underneath our actual grades.

 

My story is in violation of the rule, since it's 6th grade, but it needs to be told.

 

I was in a Spanish Immersion program where I got to learn Spanish from 1st grade on, and so we actually had the same teacher for two year blocks in 3-4, and 5-6 once our school went to a split schedule (Core Room with your main teacher then an Art-Science Block for half a year, Music-Social Studies block for the other half) depending on which grade you where you'd do Core in the morning or afternoon. Anyways, I digress, I had the same teacher for 5th and 6th grade.

 

I always was good at reading, and liked books, so I was reading more advanced stuff than most of my classmates, so when I was asked to write stories they tended to be a little more advanced than my fellow students. For like a month of my 6th grade year my teacher was on some trip to Mexico or something with our sister school in Mexico City, so we had a perma-sub who was working towards getting a full time position as a teacher. She assigned us to write a Halloween story that was at least two pages long. Not a big deal, I did my assignment, but the story took off in my head and wound up being like 7 pages long. I'm not saying it was great, but it went that long. I think I befriended Frankenstein's monster and then we had to fight off a bunch of zombies or something. The teacher said I couldn't have possibly written the story myself and said I had to write a different story after school or she wouldn't accept it and I'd fail.

 

Fortunately, we had library that day, and the Head Librarian was a neighbor and she noticed I was sad and asked me what was going down. She told me to go pick out a book and she'd talk to the teacher, after that I got my story handed back with a B plus on it with no markings at all.

 

I got in trouble once for using the term Bastard Sword in a story once too. The best is the student teacher had to explain the word bastard to me, so I could understand why it was bad, she was all awkward, it was funny.

[BruteSquad_BRODY 0]

In 2nd or 3rd grade, I was appalled that a classmate made fun of those who still watched Sesame Street.

 

I had a bladder problem/surgeries when I was a toddler so I pissed my pants til like 5th or 6th grade. I did it so often I had extra clothes stored in the nurses office. One day in 2nd grade we came in from recess, and I went to class and asked to go to the bathroom. The teacher said no and so I sat in my plastic desk chair and peed myself. I remember the urine stream dripping off the edge of the chair. I didn't say a word and went on to the next class. The next kid found the puddle of pee in the chair and they came and pulled me from class.

 

I had peed my pants in 3rd grade, was trying to hide it (I wore jogging pants til 9th grade every day at school due to my obeseity) I had no read in front of the whole class, and Kenny Massey, my classmate yelled out "Andy peed his pants" Oh the embarassment.

[Kinetic 0]

I was in this musical in fifth grade:

 

 

This is my only elementary school memory.

[Guest Smues]

We had the dreaded 1-5 scale. Well through 3rd grade it was 1-3, and there were like 6 total grades, basically just one for each broad subject. Then when I hit 4th grade they revamped it to a 1-5 scale, and expanded it so their were like 42 catagories. Maybe more. The one thing I liked about Jr. High was getting the A,B,C scale. The 1-5 scale was so stupid, and if I recall correctly it was mainly a 1-3 scale anyway because a 4 was some wierd number you never got that was only used if you missed like 2 months of the quarter or something, and a 5 didn't mean you failed, it just meant you hadn't tried.

[Cran Da Maniac 0]

Unlike some people, the grades at the different schools I went to were kind of weird. It went like this

 

Elementary: K-3

Middle: 4-6

Jr. High: 7-8

High: 9-12

 

 

Though when I was in 6th Grade, the Middle School that I went to (Mocksville Middle) changed it's named to Central Davie Elementary, they moved the 6th graders to the Jr High (Which they renamed South Davie Middle School) and moved the 9th graders from the Jr High to the High School. I think now they closed Central Davie and the elementary school is K-5, Middle 6-8 and High School 9-12

 

Anywho, Like others here, I was really good with geography. I was always looking at Atlas's and memorizing the countries, or at a state map memorizing the counties of our state. I did when a few Geography Bee's in class, but could never get past the School Bee (I could remember where United Arab Emirates is, but not what it's chief export).

 

I was once suspended from the Bus in 5th grade. Like Milky whenever I would wear a ball cap, kids would either hit the little thing on the back, making it loose or would take it off my head and throw it. This one kid pulled it off my head and threw it while on the bus, I told him to go get it. He said No. I punched him in the stomach an then started beating his back. We were both suspended from riding the bus, him for 3 days and me for 5 days.

 

When I was in 1st grade, we had some concert outside that was put on by the High School Band. Nobody thought that having kids outside for a few hours while it was hot was a bad idea, nor did they think about the need for water. I remember that the concert was so long that we got to eat lunch outside (which I thought was a cool thing. Also remember being mad that the song they played from the Top Gun movie wasn't Highway to the Dangerzone, but that's not important). Anywho, I eat my lunch of Chips, PB&J (I was addicted to them at that point) and Kool-aid, go thru another couple of hours until the concert is over. Then we all walked inside, and they had us line up if we had to go to the bathroom, with one kid allowing any other kids that have to go in to the bathroom when a stall opened up. I was standing at the door, waiting to go in when I puked a red liquid all over the floor. I'm not exaggerating when I say the whole floor was covered.

 

And one more outside moment in 1st grade. Remember the Dizzy Bat races, where you'd run down to a bat, pick it up, put your head on it and spin around it, then run back. Well one day we were doing that with the teachers, and my Teacher's Assistant fell down, and didn't get back up. She was still alive, but something happened and they had to take her to the hospital.

 

 

[PILLS! PILLS! PILLS! 0]

It's all coming back to me now...

 

1. I was one of a handful of kids in my school enrolled in the Pupil Enrichment Program (P.E.P.), where we were bussed to another school once a month to work with shitty apple computers and science projects. Actually, I was only one of two people in my 3rd grade class who was accepted. The others were all older... especially Katie O'Sullivan... oh my, she had to be at least six inches taller than me at the time. Intimidating.

 

2. Won my elementary school spelling bee. For some reason that didn't get me any more play with the ladies.

 

3. I single-handedly sparked the four-square reappraisal phenomenon in my school back in 1992. Not that it's a big deal. I just never got any credit for it when I should have. Those fuckfaces...

 

4. I was a part-time "crossing guard" every third week, volunteering my services so that a bunch of obnoxious 1st graders could make it to class in the early afternoon. Now that I think of it, I've never put that on my resume.

 

5. The woman who taught both my first and second grade classes was awesome. I was her favorite. I was the only student who was invited/attended her wedding. She used to play "That's What Friends Are For" (the Dionne/Gladys/Elton/Stevie version) in class. I think about her every time I hear that song.

[Cran Da Maniac 0]

3. I single-handedly sparked the four-square reappraisal phenomenon in my school back in 1992. Not that it's a big deal. I just never got any credit for it when I should have. Those fuckfaces...

 

Ah man, 4 Square was the game when I was in school. I was in a before and after school program that the YMCA put on from 2nd to 6th grades. 4 Square was one of the games that we'd play. Did you guys use rules like double taps (or no double taps) and other stuff, or did you play standard.

 

Also, like somebody said earlier in this thread, me and another kid was the defacto Bash Brothers when we played Kickball, being that if you had one of us on your team, we were guaranteed to be able to launch a ball all the way across the gym to hit the wall, which was a home run.

 

 

 

[Smartly Pretty 0]

Am I the only one young enough to have seen Joshua Toole on Channel One? I swear to God he was high when he delivered the news.

[Cran Da Maniac 0]

Don't remember him, but I remember seeing Anderson Cooper on Channel 1. Also Tracy Smith, who we thought was like 40.

[Kinetic 0]

Yeah, I remember Anderson Cooper on Channel 1. Alison Stewart, too.

[Cran Da Maniac 0]

Man, the only good thing about Channel One is it gave you 30 mins to copy somebody's homework for that day.

[Kinetic 0]

One of my middle schools did both Channel 1 and a closed-circuit thing, so that killed a good 45 minutes right at the beginning of the day. The kid who did the closed-circuit show was yanked off the air and severely punished for making fun of me over the air, for the whole school to hear. I was mortified beyond description. This was middle school, too, so it was quite a bit more socially damaging than it would have been just a few years prior.

[MFer 0]

Did anyone else not have the typical A to F grading system in elementary school? Until fourth grade, I guess they thought those letters carried too much of a stigma and would hurt the kids's feelings or something, so we got...different letters!

 

The school's K-3 grading system was:

 

O - outstanding

S+ - I can't remember exactly what this stood for but it was a step up from satisfactory

S - satisfactory

I - improvement needed

U - unsatisfactory

 

I never got a U! But I did get I's in art and behavior in third grade.

We didn't have O's, but we did have G's (good) and V's (very good). And E's instead of F's once you got to 4th grade.

[the max 0]

1st grade: Don't remember much. Got into the usual trouble.

 

2nd grade: I actually remember even less about second grade. The one memory I have is being thrilled when my mom volunteered to be a chaperone for a field trip.

 

3rd grade: We had a spelling bee with only baseball words, which I was arrogant about since I knew more about baseball than anyone in the class. We even got to go to the field in front of the school with the baseball diamond, divide up into teams and the teacher would "pitch" the words to us and based on their difficulty it would be a single, double, etc if we got it right. So, I was batting third, had two "runners" on, both of them getting on with the words "fielder" and "error". My word? "Tony Conigliaro"...I knew who he was, I spelled the word right, but was "out". Why? Because when I correctly spelled the name, I didn't say "capital T" or "capital C". The teacher played that bullshit with a fucking seven year old .

 

4th grade: I was a master of double digit multiplication. We would have races as a class for extra credit where everyone in the class and the teacher would race to finish a worksheet with 50 multiplication problems on it. I got so much extra credit from these sheets that halfway through the year, I wasn't allowed to win anymore.

[BUTT 0]

Oh, something else I remember: In 2nd grade, we had this program called "Religious Release", where all the Catholic students would get out for an hour every Wednesday afternoon for a session of Sunday-school-on-a-Wednesday. This is strange because it was a public school, without any religious affiliation. It was pretty nice to be able to leave school for an hour to talk about Jesus, but there is no way they would do that now, I'm sure. Athiest Dads would be bitching up a storm.

[Dandy 0]

We had some pretty bangin' food in the cafeteria back in "Grade School." One of my favorites was "spiced ham sandwich" day. It was always served with baked beans and chips, among other things. I would take off the top piece of bread, put the baked beans on top of the ham, then a few chips on top of the beans and replace the bread. Squeeze the sandwich a little to crunch the chips, and that was one of my favorite sandwiches.

 

We also were allowed to walk across the street to "Dairy Delight," which was a Dairy Queen that went away from the corporate design. They had the English style hotdogs that were toasted on the sides. Every day that I went there, I got a footlong hotdog, grilled cheese, and strawberry milkshake.

 

Some mornings, I was allowed to walk across the street to another local restaurant (as I got older, we ate luch there because you could get lasagna and other good daily specials). We were supposed to only be able to go for lunch, but my mom gave me permission to pick up breakfast during recess if I got her something. I would get a steak and egg sandwich with mayo on toast if I was heading back to school, or a platter of biscuits and gravy if I was eating there.

 

Besides being on steroids such as prednisone for having asthma and allergies, this was a major reason I was such a chubby little kid.

[Guest Smues]

I had to watch Reading Rainbow all the way through sixth grade. Don't get me wrong I loved it when I was a kid, but by sixth grade not only do you feel too old for it, but you've seen every episode a thousand times. It didn't help that the other sixth grade class got to watch Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and we didn't. Another memory of sixth grade was one day I had a really bad cough. Nothing else, just a cough. Otherwise I felt fine. The teacher sent me home because it was disrupting class, so of course I exploited this and got I think 10 days out of school that year for my disruptive cough. I also got out of some tests and assignments that year because I had awful handwriting and the teacher had me practice my handwriting instead of do whatever the class was working on. That was awesome. I also got out of a complete weeks worth of schoolwork because it was the week honor band toured the other elementary schools, and my teacher said something to the extent of "You're smart, there's no need to make you make this work up." Sixth grade was a really wierd year in retrospect, but I enjoyed it well enough.

 

Oh and here's one, which I probably mentioned in the sex ed thread but I feel the need to repeat it. We watched a video called "Boys Beware" which BTW is really awful and can easily scar small children. There were three scenarios in the video where a boy or boys got molested by adults. For the life of me I can't remember the 3rd one, but the first two were:

-Some boy has a birthday party and invites all of his friends. His mom and sister run off to the store or something, leaving the boys with just the birthday brats dad. The boys are wrestling, so dad says "Hey now you can't wrestle, you'll get your clothes dirty...so just take your clothes off to wrestle while I go get the videocamera to film it." I'm not making that up either.

-Boy helps his uncle paint the house or do some time of grueling house work. Boy goes inside to cool off and take a shower, uncle gets naked and tries to join boy in the shower.

 

Now really, did they NEED to show this to sixth grade boys? At that age aren't you well enough aware of shit like that? And the really unfair part was we never got to watch "Girls Beware" if such a film exists. And the main reason I remember the boys beware stuff so vividly is because I got in trouble right when the tape started because it starts with a white text/black screen displaying all these statistics like about how "x percent of boys under age 13 are molested, x percent have been molested by family, x number get abused every day" etc. etc., and then it said something about x number of boys will be molested today or this week or something like that, and my friend Jeremy blurts out "COMING ATTRACTIONS" and I just lost it in laughter, and I don't think I stopped even while we watched boys wrestle naked at a birthday party.

[Dandy 0]

In fourth grade, this girl shit her pants in class. All of a sudden, it just reaked to high heavens of the foulest odor imaginable. You know how it smells when you are sick and you piss out of your ass? It smelled like someone shit that on roadkill. All the kids were complaining and the teacher was opening the windows and doors. No one knew for sure who it was (well, hopefully the girl knew) and for the first few minutes, there was a thought that the school had a sewer malfunction. There were lots of "Oh god, what's that smell?!?" because you know that once it is brought up, the other children must be attention-seeking and complain about it in the same fashion. All hell broke loose when the kid with a slight speech impediment loudly exclaimed, "That's Diahthea...I know, I've fsmelled it befull."

 

The girl's name was Angela but I can't place the last name. She was only there for that year, possibly due to almost closing the school down with her ass that day.

[King Kamala 0]

I've got an amusing sex-ed anecdote. At the end of 4th grade, we split the class in half and boys went with the male sex ed teacher and females went with the female sex ed teacher and we had a talk on puberty. The girls got to watch a video in the classroom and we had to go to the moldy ass reading room to have a talk with our teacher. Anyways, the male teacher was a rambling old guy and the way he explained an erection made me and several other kids thought getting an erection involved blood flowing out of the penis when you get sexually aroused. Needless to say, we were horrified. Now I knew what a boner was but I had no idea what the technical term was, hence the confusion.

 

 

[Red Baron 0]

I don't remember any sex-ed teachings in school at all. I learned via Playboy before I found the internet.

 

Actually I do remember being one of the first students to have Internet, and also Cable Internet.

 

I remember in Grade 1, during show and tell a girl in my class, Kim I believe said she had something so show and just pissed herself all over the carpet. She had a skirt on too, and it went straight down like a waterfall. Funny as hell.

 

Also in French class my teacher decided to hook up the TV and during class we would watch hockey games in French. This usually happened on a Monday class for some reason.

[Nighthawk 0]

In Spanish class we watched soccer games in Spanish, although this was middle school. I lobbied for wrestling, but to no avail (there was a reason given... don't remember it).

[Jingus 0]

I don't remember any sex-ed teachings in school at all.

I was gonna say, all this talk of sex ed in grade school is outside my experience. The only time I ever had a sex ed class was in 8th grade. Apparently they felt like waiting until after puberty had struck to inform you about it. Also, you guys had foreign language classes before high school? Really? Man my schools sucked.

[Nighthawk 0]

Well, mine was middle school, and he lives in a foreign country, so not quite so bad.

 

I did get sex ed in 5th grade, although they gave the parents an option to not let their kid go, which is what happened with me (I'd already been taught at home). I was present at the follow up Q&A the next week though, featuring the timeless classic "When men want to become women, what do they do to them?" The short answer is, of course, they turn their dick outside in, but the rambling nonsense they answered that with led me to believe they probably didn't even know.

[Guest Tzar Lysergic]

I forged my dad's name on every permission slip ever, mostly at his behest. Apparently a teacher called him at work once (which was a friggin' sawmill at the time) and asked something like "Did you receive the permission slip for Gene to go on such-and-such activity?"

 

"Yeah, sure."

 

He told me about that about ten years after it happened. Don't know how the topic came up. Why the hell do they need permission for that kind of shit? Dumb.

 

I'm pretty sure the local school board thought he had the penmanship of a third grader.

[BruteSquad_BRODY 0]

All the sex ed talk reminded me of one of my most awkward High School moments. I somehow or someway got signed up for a "Child Care Class" And we had class in the home eco. room. It was 300 lb Goofy looking Brody and 14 other girls. No guys but me. I tried to get out of the class but the class director talked me out of it somehow.

 

Long story short... One day we had to watch a 20 minute video on how to properly breast feed. The video was live action and very descriptive. The girls were all uncomfortable as hell, and then there was me, who stared at the wall til some of the girls begged the teacher to shut it off. Then everyone broke out in laughter at me, and even the teacher asked me what the hell I was doing in this class.