What I did in kindergarten all day

Today, I visited the school Jim is mostly likely going to go to if the odds work out in our favor. I felt pretty reassured by my visit -- it seems like a cute place with reasonable policies (a whole half hour for recess after a half hour lunch, for example). As we saw the halls filled with 100th day of school pictures and Dr. Seuss birthday decorations and Valentines and shamrocks, I got really, really excited about him going there. (If the lottery works out :D)

This whole process has given me lots of flashbacks from my kindergarten days. As far as I can remember, it was just 180 days of nonstop fun with my energetic teacher, Mrs. Cooley. As I recall snippets about Thanksgiving plays and Valentine teas and chicks in incubators, I think, "Oh, I hope my kids get to do this fun stuff too!"

My kindergarten picture. Still not sure where it falls on the spectrum between darling and creepy doll. 

Although I can't remember all the specifics (I couldn't say, for example, if we did 90 minutes of literacy and 60 minutes of math, like these kids will), I have definitely held onto the most important elements of what we did in kindergarten all day. For example:

1. Talk. We all sat at tables and chatted with each other as we worked on our assignments from Mrs. Cooley. There was one boy that was a little mean so I was a little scared of him, but he was also a fountain of knowledge.
"If your brain stopped working, you would just freeze in place. Like this!" And he would demonstrate. The argument commenced about whether you would die or just freeze, and I really didn't know the answer. (Apparently you die.)

He also taught us the cool way to count to 100. "One, two, skip a few, 99, 100." I kind of liked the real way better, the way with all the numbers on the chart with all the great patterns. But he did seem really cool when he counted like that.

So I wanted to be cool back. One time he and a few other boys were talking about football because somehow even 5 year olds can be fairly knowledgeable about the NFL. I decided to interject.

"My uncle plays football. Maybe you've heard of him." I knew that my mom had mentioned that he played football in high school, so maybe he was kind of famous.

"What's his name?"

"Erik Rytting."

The boy paused for a moment, looked thoughtful, and nodded. "Yeah. Yeah. I think I have heard of him!" I felt a glow of pride to be related to someone so famous.

I learned lots from other kids too. One boy started always saying, "I don't like you. I love you," to me and everyone else all the time. Then he explained. "Since we are all children of Heavenly Father, that means we're all brothers and sisters. So we all love each other! That's why I love you.

I thought that was a pretty good explanation, and I also felt flattered that he loved me. Maybe it meant we would get married someday.

2. Recess was a pretty important 15 or so minutes of the day. We cycled through various parts of the playground different days depending on the weather. In the early fall and late spring, the big south-facing metal slide was way too hot to go on, but in the winter it was a coveted piece of real estate to lie down on, basking in the heat it provided. We also used it for some weird game called "crocodile" where I think kids at the bottom were the crocodiles that tried to drag kids down the slide, and other kids at the top would help rescue them. Although I don't remember any dislocated arms or other injuries, the slide was gone by the time I finished elementary school so someone somewhere must have recognized it as a safety hazard.

Except for the one boy who was shorter than me in both kindergarten and first grade, I was probably the smallest kid on the playground, and it was intimidating being out there with all the big kids, especially the 5th graders. One time a bossy 5th grader wouldn't let us go on the twisty slide, and our teacher got mad at her. I was grateful for her intervention, but I was also just in awe that a person could be as old as that 5th grader. Somehow I knew that even when I was a 5th grader I wouldn't be as old as her. It's been almost 22 years, and I'm still not as old as her.

Although I usually stuck close to my friends Rebecca and Brittany (we were dubbed the Three Musketeers), one day they must have been gone and I was playing mostly by myself. Then I looked around and realized I was playing even more by myself than I thought -- I couldn't find any of my classmates! Where had they gone? I frantically ran all around the playground again and again and again. Surely someone was still out there! I saw a neighbor boy in 1st grade playing and ran up to him, eager to see a friendly face. "Maybe they went inside," he said. Then his whistle blew and he said he had to go. "See ya," he said, leaving me alone.

In what felt like a matter of seconds, whistle after whistle blew, and all the kids hurried in. I stood there in horror. I was the last kid on the playground.

I saw the last teacher heading inside, and in a panic I asked her where my class went. She took me to my classroom and found my teacher. The rest of my class had gone to some assembly with a clown, so for the next little while it was just me and my teacher there. I sipped my milk (I was way too late to get the chocolate milk that day) and ate my graham cracker and she just sort of chatted with me. Cleaned up some milk that spilled on the ground. It was sort of a surreal experience being there with a teacher like that. Before too long, the rest of the class was back, and no one seemed to care at all about my traumatizing experience on the playground. But that was okay -- it was less embarrassing that way.

3. There were plenty of other times I was traumatized, come to think of it. We learned a lot about fire safety, especially since it had just been a few years since the school had caught on fire, and I spent days following those lessons wondering when my house was going to catch on fire. And what was I supposed to do? I had just moved down to a bedroom in the basement, and all we learned about was how to leave upper-story bedrooms. My parents reassured me it would be really easy to climb out of my basement window, but it was still really troubling to think about.

Worse though was the poison assembly. It wasn't a normal assembly in the gym. Instead it was in a smaller room so we could be up close for the horrors that ensued. They acted out scenario after scenario in which kids made unwise decisions about dangerous chemicals, and then they would freeze. A woman dressed up like Raggedy Ann would press play on the tape recorder and sing, "Some things are No-No's! No-No's! Stop before you do!" or some other melody that seared itself into my hippocampus and left nightmares for weeks afterwards about poisons. 

Then, of course, there was the time there was a substitute. I think we had one very occasionally, and most of the time it was really fine. But then one time it was just this strange, strange man named Dr. Cool. He had funny glasses, short golden curly hair, and a bowtie, and he seemed oddly familiar in an unsettling way.

"Who is that?" we whispered to each other. "Maybe it's Mr. Cooley," I suggested. We knew there was something unnatural enough about Dr. Cool to be some kind of joke, but who was playing it?

After recess, we were all relieved to find out Mrs. Cooley was back. And, lo and behold, she had been Dr. Cool all along! Then she promised us to never tell our younger siblings so she could play the same trick on them in a few years.

What wasn't so traumatizing though was her classroom. It was more cool than scary to have a pet tarantula in the class, and once you got used to the mounted deer head on the wall during Christmas time, that was kind of cool too. We learned pretty early on that tarantulas, snakes, and mounted deer were not real threats, but fires and poisons were. So I guess in that sense I learned what I really needed to from kindergarten.

4. Utah turned 100 years old about halfway through kindergarten, so that of course meant lots of celebrations and assemblies.

I was in the black, doing my usual strange smile.

Perhaps the most exciting part was how we got to learn all the songs for the centennial assembly. Of course, only the 5th graders got to sing the best song about iron wheels a-rolling and meeting up at Promontory Point, but we still had the tape so we could sing it at home. And, of course, dance to it.

In addition to the assembly, we had lots of assignments having to do with Utah turning 100 -- birthday cakes, prompts, and pictures to draw. As you can see, I clearly took advantage of everything Utah had to offer.

although, I enjoyed croquet less once I learned about poison

of course I did. there were free samples.

5. Somehow in the midst of all this we found time to learn our letters and numbers. Each week we had an assignment to find a few pictures that started with the letter we were learning about and glue them into our workbook. I recently talked to my mom about this, and this was the first time I found out it was just supposed to be 3 pictures per letter. I had thought we needed to fill the entire two pages. So each week I would come in with all sorts of pictures from all sorts of ads and magazines glued in, often overlapping each other because there wasn't space for all of them. It was hard work, but it sure was satisfying to see that my book could barely close right for all the glue and pictures in it.

We also spent a lot of time coloring, which I really enjoyed. One time though we had an assignment to draw a bus. I looked around and everyone reached for the yellow and black crayons to draw the school bus. I frowned. I didn't ride the bus to school, and I had never even been on one. I knew what they looked like well enough, but that didn't mean I wanted to draw it.

But I still drew a bus. The city bus. Not that I had been on that either, but at least it was not as ugly as a school bus.

Although my defiant streak didn't manifest very often, I guess it showed up when I colored. One time my teacher told me that rainbows and fireworks would never happen at the same time. So when I got home, I decided to draw my own picture that she would never see. It had rainbows, fireworks, and even candy falling from the sky for good measure.

I am pretty sure I kept that picture on my wall for like 6 years.

And that defiance served me well on the last day of school. As Leslie and I walked home, some boys came out with their squirt guns and began to spray us in a last-day-of-school kind of exuberance.

I immediately stuck my hands in the irrigation ditch and waved the droplets at the boys. "We don't need you to spray us! We're already wet, see? SEE?" Leslie dragged me away, telling me that would only encourage them. She didn't understand that I had probably just saved her life, but it was okay. Kindergarten had been a triumphant year of my life, and I had just ended it in victory.