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girl-in-the-library · 6 years ago

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Elementary School Memories

I was thinking a lot last night about things I remembered from my childhood. I think it came from a fanart of Crowley as Nanny Ashtoreth questioning when Warlock’s permanent memories would begin to form. So I began to wonder...what memories do I have of things from when I was a child? So I decided to write some down here...in as close to chronological order as I can.

I’m just going to do memories until I was 10 - the end of 5th grade - because I started writing this and it got super fucking long so I figured middle and high school memories could come another time, if I decide to do that.

Under a cut for length

I went trick or treating with my sister and my dad. She was dressed as a Dalmatian from 101 Dalmatians but she lost her mask at some point during the night. I was dressed as Pocahontas because that was my favorite Disney movie

I was swinging on the monkey swing when an enormous moose ran through the back yard. I ran inside the house, terrified (it was probably not a moose. It was probably just a large, male deer and I was tiny)

We won a giant monkey at my town’s 4th of July carnival, but it was one of those ones that was filled with newspaper/packing peanuts as filling (you know, a typical carnival prize) and so my mom made us keep it on the enclosed porch so when it eventually got moldy we could just throw it out instead of having it drip in the house

Singing “Who knows one?” in the stairwell of preschool (I can only think of up to seven nowadays...)

“gym class” in preschool included a game where we all were in a very large circle and we had to walk around it and then sit on cushions and it seems kinda like musical chairs in hindsight, except we all always got chairs

blowing kisses at the boy I had a crush on in kindergarten until he got uncomfortable and told the teacher (who I also had a crush on) and I got in trouble, but like, little kid trouble

I went to this kid’s house for a birthday party that was pirate themed, and I was one of only two girls there. We made treasure boxes out of little wooden boxes that we decorated with markers and glitter and plastic gems

Climbing to the top of the playground with my kindergarten teacher (he was also my first grade teacher) and the rest of my class during recess as he sang “I am the pirate king!” from Pirates of Penzance and we would all reply with “Hurrah for the Pirate King!”

Going to see said teacher act in a local performance of The Secret Garden. He was an actor, I remember him being very good, but I don’t know if he acts anymore (I think he’s a third grade teacher now)

His name was Mr. Congdon (though I don’t remember if that’s how it was spelled)

The day I moved into a new house I was so upset I went to first grade crying and wanted to talk to my teacher about it, but we had a substitute that day (my dad remembers this exactly the opposite - that I was all smiles and excited, and my teacher wasn’t absent, and I was babbling on and on about my new room, etc)

The Kelly-Lexi war at recess. Kelly and Lexi were enemies, and everyone on the playground was either on Kelly’s side or Lexi’s side. I was on Lexi’s side, my future best friend Krislyn was on Kelly’s side. We made battle strategies and drew them in the dirt and pretended to fight each other.

“planting” an apple seed in a rock and trying to water it with ice chips

My first two pokemon cards were a Ponyta and a fire energy.

The pack of pokemon cards from Toys R Us that I got a shiny Ninetails in and being so fucking excited

Trading a Mewtwo card for a Gyarados card

Trading a Dugtrio card for an Articuno card

Pokemon cards getting banned from school

getting glasses in second grade

my second grade teacher being absent for a while, and then dying (the first time I ever saw a therapist was after she died). Her name was Ms. Klein

Digimon cards. I don’t think I ever did anything but collect them, and I only had a small amount, but I loved my Digimon cards.

Crazy Bones. Little plastic collectible nothings that you would play with by flicking them at each other. (These things)

playing and trading Crazy Bones with the neighbor kid across the street, Drew, in my backyard

The game shop where I spent my allowance on crazy bones, pokemon and digimon cards going out of business

Being afraid to sleep in my own room, so I slept on my sister’s floor for months. My parents actually made a chart, that if I slept in my own room for a week, I would get a pack of pokemon/digimon cards or crazy bones.

the 50 states quiz - where we got one M&M for each state we could name, and if we got all 50 we got an extra 50 M&Ms (or skittles, if you didn’t like chocolate). I hadn’t memorized the 50 states song yet, so I only got 46 states

everyone being so proud they could spell Massachusetts, but when our teacher asked if anyone could spell Connecticut (the state I lived in) none of us could

learning to spell Connecticut

My first Yu Gi Oh card was one whose name I can’t remember, but it was a regular card, not too good stats, with a blue atlantean sea monster on it? I kept it in a card case and carried it around at school

Buying three Kaiba starter decks so I could have three Blue Eyes White Dragons and not understanding that I needed polymerization and a Blue Eyes Ultimate fusion card to actually make Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon in the game

Yu Gi Oh cards being banned from school

Mad Science Camp in the summer. I went for two weeks, for several summers, but this summer in particular I remember one week we built mini robot kits and at the other I don’t remember what we did but the boys were obsessed with yu gi oh and I wanted to play with them but they wouldn’t let me play because I was a girl (and the other girls, except for my sister, didn’t understand why I wanted to play yu gi oh)

Those same boys, when I climbed onto the jungle gym wanting to play yu gi oh with them, saying “let’s scream like a girl until she goes away” and then they screamed at me until I went away

math minutes - doing as many math problems as we could in a minute. If we got 100%, we got a candy or a bonus point on our next test.

my third grade teacher reading to us. Her name was Mrs. Klein, I think she was cousins with the Ms. Klein who was my second grade teacher who died. she read the BFG and it absolutely terrified me - not the BFG himself, but the other giants who would crunch on children’s bones. I couldn’t sleep at night and had to talk to my teacher and she said that if I was scared or uncomfortable just to ask to go to the bathroom and she would let me

Bug check. I made my dad check my bedroom for bugs every night before I went to bed because I was scared of them. I’m still freaked out by a lot of bugs, and definitely arachnophobic.

officially meeting my best friend Krislyn and playing Mario Party 2 all the freaking time (she was the one who inspired me to ask for an N64 for my birthday)

the new kid Mark from California who became one of my best friends

the crush I had on Mark from California that I confessed to him at recess one day and then as soon as I said it immediately ran and hid behind a bench on the other side of the playground. I made Krislyn go and check what his reaction was and he was standing confused by the fence

Playing dodgeball in gym class and jumping over 4 balls at once (this might not be real, but it is definitely a memory I have)

deciding to try and bring Pokemon to life with my friends Krislyn, Mark, and Tyler by extracting the DNA of a Poliwag from the Poliwag pokemon cards and putting it in a fishtank with a bunch of tadpoles.

Accidentally killing a bunch of tadpoles

making an upset face when in gym class my teacher told us we were only running one lap today (hah! wouldn’t I love that to happen at LITERALLY ANY OTHER POINT IN MY LIFE) and the teacher pulling me aside and telling me that was very rude

sitting around on benches at recess making up our own Pokemon and telling each other stories about the Mario universe (basically writing fanfiction, but we didn’t know what that was yet)

my favorite pokemon that I ever made was called Tickel, it was a blue bear with spikes on its ears and it wore a shell kinda like Togepi

Having multiple teachers for the first time in 4th grade - we had one teacher for math (I don’t remember his name), one for science (Mrs. Iacurci) , and then one for history (Ms. Greenberg) and english (Ms. Koritko). Ms. Koritko was my homeroom/main teacher.

Getting a C for the first time on any test ever in science class, but on my favorite subject - Outer space.

my 4th grade teacher playing Enya for us while we were doing our writing assignments

September 11, 2001. It was a Tuesday. A lot of people were getting called out early and none of us knew what was going on. Ms. Koritko was trying to keep the class calm but we were all really rowdy because things were so strange. She told us we were going to have indoor recess as punishment for being rowdy - but I think they just wanted to keep us inside. When we went home, our parents were waiting for me and my sister by the bus stop, which they had never done before. I told them I didn’t want to go to Hebrew School that day. They told me I didn’t have to. The kitchen construction workers had just started that day tearing down the kitchen and then the news hit. My parents told me and my sister. We were worried about my Aunt, who worked in New York City, but she was fine. We were worried someone would attack Sikorsky Helicopters - a military helicopter manufacturing plant that was only 20 minutes from where I lived. Things were very scary and confusing for a fourth grader

writing in my school journal about it. we were all asked to process our feelings, and told there were therapists available. I remember writing that maybe the people who did it just wanted America’s attention.

And things moved on

Adopting my kitties Pepper and Phoebe!

My grandfather died at the end of 2001

My grandmother died at the beginning of 2002

I started writing a lot of poetry in 4th grade about death. I wrote it in a notebook with red pen. Sometimes green pen.

Here’s one of the overdramatic poems I wrote:

“Be still, be soft, my beating heart, because the battle’s won / come home to me, my love, before the day is done. / Come home to me, my love, as I darespeak these words. / The chase is on, my love, as the horses fill the land / And you soon will be battling again / The enemy’s near and you will have to lend a helping hand / but, my love, please come back to me, safe as a beach of warm sand / The leaves have fallen one too many times and you have not come back / so I must go and fight with you / but I find you are gone so the time has come for me to go too / because waiting to die for all these years shall put me in despair / but to be up there with you is no punishment nor crime / so die, my self, die, die, die!

And another one:

As darkness descends, I mournfully cry. / Never again will my tears dry / Sadness engulfs me / I’m lost in the dark / as blackness threatens to crush my heart / peace will forever elude me until the day I die / as I close the casket and whisper goodbye

A book report on the book Julie of the Wolves - which was probably my favorite book report I wrote ever

One time I was trying to do group work but no one in my group was even paying attention and Ms. Koritko noticed I was trying so hard to get everyone to work but was getting frustrated, so she came over and said “Come on guys, Nikki is rolling her eyes here!” and then I rolled my eyes really overdramatically and she laughed

We all had to write a little “book” called Collections containing one piece of creative writing, and one piece of expository writing. My expository writing was an essay on the topic of love. My creative piece was called “Princess Blue and the Mystery of the Scary Noises.” It was about a princess with blue hair named Princess Blue, who went on a camping trip with her parents who were the king and queen, her brother Prince Red (who had red hair) and her two best friends whose names I don’t remember. One night they heard scary noises. They thought it was a monster! But it was just a squirrel. They laughed really hard at their mistake!

Princess Blue came into being as a character because one day I came out of the shower and had a blue towel, which I let hang over my head. I saw myself in the mirror and thought, “Man, wouldn’t it be AWESOME to have blue hair?”

I had a teacher named John Johnson.

Mr. Johnson and Ms. Nelson were every 5th grader’s OTP. We used to “spy” on them at recess and we all thought they were getting married because they “flirted” (they were probably just talking with each other). We were all devastated when Ms. Nelson moved away to get married to her boyfriend and teach in another district

Ms. Greenberg died from complications with her pregnancy when she had a baby at the beginning of my 5th grade year. This is the second teacher who I had who died while I was in elementary school

Mr. Spillane and his M&M machines

Mr. Spillane collected M&M dispensers. He had all sorts of cool ones and he would give out M&Ms as treats and prizes. We got to pull the handles on the little funny dispensers and M&Ms would fall out, it was great

Sentence of the Day was one of our daily chances to get M&Ms - we had a “Thesaurasus” (a notebook with a picture of a dinosaur on it) and he would give us a word with three synonyms. We had to write a sentence for each synonym and then share our favorite sentence with the class. Mr. Spillane would pick one sentence from each synonym and that kid would get M&Ms

The Mr. Spillane Football League. We were learning percentages in math class. Mr. Spillane developed a “football league” where we divided into teams of 2 and each of us represented a team in the NFL. We would each represent our own player plus one of the players from the actual team, so each football team had four players. Each player had numbers that they could move on, for example, the actual player that I had was Tiki Barber from the Giants - and he could move on a roll of 2 or 5, or something like that. So we had to pay tokens to bet on which player would move and if we matched, we got to move a certain number of yards. We played a full “season” of football and then we finally got to the “Super Bowl.” My team, the giants, got to the championship game before the super bowl, but lost there.

The Mario Movie - Krislyn and I were handwriting a script for a Mario Movie called “Toadstool Kingdom Sensation”. We handwrote it in several notebooks using gel pens. We ran out of gel pens so frequently Mr. Spillane joked he ought to buy stock in the gel pen company

We had Mr. Spillane read it as we were writing it. I’m sure it was absolute shit, but he reacted like it was the funniest thing he had ever read, even too crazy for him to understand

Daisy was the main character because she was Krislyn’s favorite, and Krislyn had a stronger will than I did. Peach was also featured prominently because she was my favorite character. Peach and Mario were dating, but Daisy was dating a talking, more human version of Yoshi, because we made Luigi SUPER STUPID. We called the species “yoshis” LDTs, which stood for Lizard-Turtle-Dinosaur. There were lots of booger jokes because Luigi liked to pick his nose.

We wrote a song that Luigi sang: “The best part of pasta is eating spaghetti / then I like to blow it out of my nose / but my feelings are totally different / when I’m eating ice cream!”

The only line I remember from the actual script is “There’s a fat weirdo in the haystack and Peach is hitting him with a hammer” because when Mr. Spillane was reading it, he exclaimed aloud, “There’s a FAT WEIRDO in the HAYSTACK?!?!?!” and Krislyn and I thought it was the funniest fucking thing ever

the context was Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi all lived together. Mario had eaten too much spaghetti and couldn’t fit through the door one night, so Yoshi told him to sleep in the haystack in the barn that night. The next morning when Peach and Daisy came to visit, they didn’t recognize Mario and they thought he was an enemy, so Peach started attacking him with a hammer while Daisy ran to get their friends

There were also aliens that were terrified of farmland involved at some point

Making a birthday card for my friend Krislyn and ending it with “I love you” and my mom said I couldn’t phrase it like that but I could sign it “Love, Nikki” so I did (and hindsight reveals a crush on Krislyn in elementary school, but that was not something I realized until looking back while in college. I think I also had a crush on Lexi, actually, now that I think about it).

The Voyage of the Mimi - did anyone else ever see this?

It was a movie featuring Ben Affleck as a child, playing a character named CT. He, and several others, including Captain Granville, some random dude, and a deaf girl whose name I think was Sally or Sarah or something like that, were going on a trip on a boat called the Mimi. I think at one point Captain Granville fell off the boat and got hypothermia and they had to save him.

This was part of a unit on ocean life and conservation, in particular whales. We all had to do a project, either a video project or a “newspaper”. Krislyn and I were partners and we chose to do a video project, which we styled like a News Report on the evening news. Well, as much as 5th graders could anyway. Krislyn’s dad filmed it, but we had no editing software or ability to edit at all, so it was all done in one take and had a lot of mistakes. We had a news story about Orca whales, a news story about ocean pollution, and interview with Captain Granville (Krislyn’s dad wearing a paper beard) and commercials. One of the commercials was for soap. It involved a toilet flushing and one of Krislyn’s little sisters “screaming” simultaneously but the timing was off and the toilet flushed, then her sister screamed and it was really funny. There was a commercial for the aquarium gift shop, where my younger sister and both of Krislyn’s explained how they spent over $1000 at the gift shop! And then at the end we went upstairs and Krislyn’s mom said, “look what I bought for dinner” and it was a package of calimari and we all said “ewwwwwwww!” and then the video ended. (Calimari is delicious, as I know now)

We had to do a book report on a mystery. I wanted to do mine on a Boxcar Children book, but my reading level was much higher than the other kids in my class, so Mr. Spillane asked me to pick a book that would be more challenging for me. I don’t remember what I picked.

We had to do a report on one of the states. I chose Texas. I don’t remember what I learned about Texas, but I made the cover of my report on pink construction paper and tried to draw the Alamo in crayon.

Another report was during Black History Month. I wrote about George Washington Carver.

Another was on Juan Ponce de Leon and the fountain of youth

The Chronicles of Narnia were my favorite books, but I read them in a really weird order. I don’t remember that order, just that I never ended up reading The Magician’s Nephew and I think I read The Silver Chair before Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I tried to read The Fellowship of the Ring when I was in 4th grade, but it was very wordy and confusing for a 8-9 year old.

We had to write a little bio for our “commencement” ceremony in 5th grade and I wrote something like, “I like reading and writing, and I’m a hockey girl!” even though I never played hockey - but hockey was my favorite sport. My favorite team was the Detroit Red Wings

At one point in elementary school, Tyler invited me over to his house to hang out but we ended up sitting in his basement and he wouldn’t let me leave until I had memorized Hillary Duff’s part in the song “What Dreams are Made of”

I also helped Tyler build a chair from scratch once

my penpal from another state, Kate, moved to my town after 3rd grade and was in my class in 4th grade

I once got in trouble during lunch because I didn’t notice the principal had asked everyone to be quiet so that she could say something and I was shouting across the table about Pokemon Blue

I wanted to learn the lyrics to “Time” by Pink Floyd because my dad played it all the time on the guitar and it was my favorite song, so my dad wrote them down for me so I could memorize them. My mom found it and thought I had written it, and thought I seriously needed counseling. She did not recognize the lyrics, nor did she think about the complexity of the song and how it would be ridiculously difficult for an 8 year old to write

I once shared with Mr. Spillane that I ran into a (male) classmate while shopping for bras at Kohl’s. I think he was embarrassed but I thought it was funny.

Seeing “Recess: School’s Out” in the theaters and my parents deciding they were never going to see another animated movie in the theaters again

...and that’s all I can think of for now. I’m sure I have more memories, but this is a lot, and it was fun to take a trip back and think about elementary school.

#oh the inanity!#memories #elementary school #trip down memory lane #this is my life

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