Is it the good times or the bad times that stay with us? Is the mental glue stronger for joy or for sorrow? For me, Grade 4 is doubly anchored by that glue.
My teacher that year was a disciplinarian with an emphasis on rote learning. Memory has never been my strong point; I developed logical work-arounds.
Spelling yielded to my logic. Given a set of 10 words to learn overnight I would almost always get 10/10 in the morning spelling bee. Until the teacher changed tactics, announcing one morning, ‘Write out the words you learned last night.’ I was instantly undone; my method was to focus on the tricky words and forget about the ones that followed the rules. I scored 4/10 that morning.
Failure in the spelling bee meant staying in during recess to write out all the words 10 times. Grumpy about this, I conveyed to the teacher my feelings about the shortcomings of his method of teaching spelling and the superiority of my selective approach. This tutorial was a bad idea. Thereafter I was a marked boy, a smarty-pants troublemaker. One day I set a pre-recess class record of 12 ‘cuts’—full-blooded strokes of the leather belt to the palm of my hand—for offences I stoutly maintained I had not committed. Life in Grade 4 became hell; I hated school.
My escape from the tyrant’s class came unexpectedly. Additional teaching staff and a transportable classroom allowed a composite Grade 4/5 class to be established. Students were drawn from existing overcrowded classes and assigned to a creative and charismatic teacher. How was the student selection process made? It wasn’t on academic merit as there was a fair spread of abilities in the transferees. Maybe it was just luck I was chosen, but it changed the course of my life. My love of learning was reignited.
Burnside Writers Group 