Elementary School

Well, I don't know why im calling this about elementary school.. I moved to the US in the middle of second grade.. it was a jumbled time of my life, and I didnt actually experience school until third grade.

Third grade at that time meant a different school. The town contained a few (three or four) K-2 schools. Sliney was for 3rd and 4th graders only.. and all of the kids in town went there together. I was not the new kid anymore.. everyone was. I was still the foreign kid and I still had a strong accent.. but at least I wasnt the new kid.

My third grade english teacher was a fat fat woman who contracted pneumonia early on in the year (I still remember staring out the window at those late summer thunderstorms in the first weeks of school..). Anyway, right before she got ill all of the third grade teachers were supposed to pick kids to be tested. My teacher was the only teacher who sent two children.. the rest sent five or more. My class contained a lot of the "trouble makers". Anyway, all of the test subjects were herded into the cafeteria area where we were given a test. An IQ test. Nothing was explained to us, and to this day it feels like some weird governmental thing to pick guinea pigs for odd experiments.

A couple of weeks later, by now my fat ass teacher was in hospital and we had a perma-sub, I was sent to some room upstairs. It was eerie walking in.. the sun was shining and there were no lights on in the room. There were some tables in there with a couple of kids sitting around. One of the girls I knew from sunday school (eromteW), and she was a loud little thing with a bit of a temper... I took the seat farthest from her which happened to be next to Stone.

I had never really seen Stone before. It was a little weird because no one seemed to really know why we were in the room, but Stone had this look on him... it was hard to describe. It wasnt exactly psychotic, but it wasnt sane either. It didn't make me understand anything, but it didnt make me want to understand. He was distant, yet not. Words would come from his mouth, but not like other people. He was aloof.

People arent generally aloof in elementary school. Stone was always writing with dull pencils, always loosing them.

It was odd because he wasnt a nerd, I don't want you to get that impression.. few folks in BOP were actually nerds. I only really noticed that when I saw Malcolm in the Middle.

This entry is making less and less sense the more I write.

I'm still not entirly sure what hte point of BOP was (or MORE in middle school). When I look at the kids that were in it, perhaps I see one advantage... take kids that are somewhat responsible (or wont get caught) and let them leave class when they feel like it, to go do alternative things. Being allowed to make things different meant not having to do things the faculty wouldnt like. More kids would benefit from that type of thing probably.

I still don't quite understand grades tho. The kids in BOP and MORE pretty much always got As without doing a bit of work, unless you pissed off the teacher one way or another. This sort of thing doesnt only apply to BOP/MORE students.. many kids just get that, while other kids can try try try and never get the teachers to be even slightly happy.

I am a horrible student, and with the amount of work I did in elementary school and middle school I should not have been getting the grades I got.