Sharon,
First of all, I agree with your mom: hold your pencil however you want! I’m glad that you shared this story, because it helped me to remember that Not-Tina-Turner was also Not-a-Nice-Lady. At the time, I didn’t think of it this way, I think because it took years before I learned to verbalize dislike of or upsettedness with adults…I just tended to assume that when they were mean or critical, it was because I had messed up. This was often true, obviously–I was a messy, goofy kid–but sometimes it was just unnecessary. Case in point (which, if my parents are reading this, they will recognize, because I became so indignant about it as an adult that I repeat this over and over):
At some point during second grade, we had to make picture frames for our parents out of cardboard and dried beans. The point was to glue the beans in a pattern on the cardboard cutout frame, and then to put our school pictures in the frame. I was minding my own business, spreading glue over the frame and beginning to stick on the beans, when Not-Tina-Turner appeared over my shoulder.
“Erin!” she yelled, “Don’t use so much glue!”
Embarrassed, and looking sheepishly at the Elmers that was dripping off the sides of my frame and oozing around the few beans I’d managed to secure, I said nothing and tried to wipe the excess with a paper towel.
“Don’t do THAT,” she shrieked, whisking the gluey mess out of my hands. She held aloft the sticky white frame for the benefit of the class. “Don’t ever hire Erin paint your house; you’ll wind up with paint everywhere!!” Returning the frame to my glue-covered desk, she softened her tone slightly: “You only need a little.”
Thanks, Not-Tina-Turner. I’ve never wasted glue since. Oh, and by the way, I’m a fabulous house-painter. It’s just that my talents are better exercised elsewhere.
As far as other kids go, I can’t seem to remember them. No one else was such a horrendous glue-waster, apparently. Now that you mention it, I do remember the pink-loving boy, and I believe that there was a boy named Kyle who I later developed a crush on in 4th grade. And yes, I remember the cast of characters who followed us throughout our time at this private school, but I don’t have explicit memories of them in our second grade classroom.
As far as private school Bible-verse memorization goes…well, it’s funny. It’s hard for me to characterize that practice now, because I feel so conflicted about it. At the time, I loved it, because I loved the feeling of memorization and the feeling of pleasing adults, both of which contributed to my lifetime of over-achieving. I was good at memorizing, because it was really just another form of word-repetition, which (as I’ve mentioned) was intensely enjoyable to me. I loved being good at things, getting good grades, being the first one to memorize that week’s verse. In retrospect, I’m suspicious about the practice of forcing children to repeat particular phrases as an ideological tool (especially when, as you point out, only certain phrases are permitted to be repeated). And this suspicion is exacerbated in this particular instance, when the person training children in religious repetition is the same person who trains them in the recitation of math facts…there’s a conflation of authorities with which I’m not particularly comfortable. When you take all of the authority at work there–the math, the religion, the glue-use…it all seems like a bit much.
Of course, if Not-Tina-Turner hadn’t been such an overbearing authority figure, who knows where we’d be? I should probably write her a thank-you note for my academic success and general parsimony. I’m sure that without her encouragement, I’d be a slovenly painter with an average memory. Horrors, indeed!
Your Life As Comp Lit 