Switching schools
From kindergarten to third grade, I attended a local public school, and from the little I do remember about it, I liked it a lot. I had friends, and school was fun. I remember field days with freeze pops after, Jump Rope for Heart jump-a-thons, and field trips! The field trip I remember the most is the last one I had while in a public school, we went to a program called Journey Through the Body. For those of you who don’t know, it pretty much sounds like what it says - there are giant models/blow up walk through things of different parts of the body. It’s sponsored by a local hospital to help school children increase knowledge and understanding about the body and ways to keep it healthy. Anyway, my dad chaperoned this one, and I don’t remember much about the trip itself. What I do remember is being pressured to touch a gelatin version of a brain, or maybe it was a cow brain?? I can’t remember the exact thing, but it was GROSS. Slimy, cold, ridges. Horrible, horrible idea. I guess it bothered me the remainder of the trip, because when we got back on the bus to go to school, I looked at my dad and said “I’m going to throw up.” He quickly emptied the plastic bag that had been holding all my free stuff, and I puked. A lot. When we got back to the school, my teacher made me stay back from lunch (in retrospect, thank you) and told me I had to go home. I was not pleased.
For fourth grade to eighth, my dad chose to move me to a private parochial school. I was really angry about it at first, I left all my friends and moved to a (very, very) small school where all the kids had already known one another from pre-K or kindergarten at the very least. I felt ostracized, it was really hard for me to connect to these kids. They had grown up together, received their First Holy Communion together, they knew each other. These kids were generally more well off than my family too - or at least, it seemed so at the time. I tried to fit in but I struggled a lot. I lied about taking tae-kwon-do to the kids who were taking karate. I brought in my stuffed toy dog on a leash to play with the girls who has Build-A-Bear dogs. After a year or so, I started to feel more comfortable among everyone. My class only had twenty-six kids, and we were basically the same twenty-six all the way up to eighth grade graduation. I remember the silly crushes I had on boys, the awesome field trips, the concerts, my first time doing public speaking at a talent show. It was a great five years once I fit in and felt relaxed (it helped that the school was literally one long hallway, impossible to get lost!) I wouldn’t trade those years for anything now, and especially as they laid the foundation for my high school years also in a private parochial school setting. I had more intimate help from teachers than I might have had at a public school, and though I talk very rarely to any of the people I went to school with during those early years, we do reconnect from time to time very easily. Those were relationships I could never recreate, and though I never was able to thank my dad for moving me there, it was one of the best things he ever did for me.