Elementary school
I attended public school through high school. I remember starting in Head Start at four or five years old, when it was new to northern Wyoming. I felt I knew a lot already, and got positive feedback from adults right away. The main things I remember from that time were going to the dentist, a new experience, and making a large fish out of paper mache. I painted it a bright orange with red lips and black eyes. It was, to my 5yo self, huge: as wide as my arm was long.
In kindergarten I loved Mrs. Sylvester, my teacher; I wrote my name as Mrs. Melinda in imitation of her, in choppy cursive letters. She had many square cartons of Cuisinaire rods, colorful unit blocks in set lengths one to ten. There was one carton per child, but if I finished my work and was very persuasive, she would let me get out all of them and make patterns using all or most of the blocks myself. She spent hours putting them back into separate containers afterwards.
My first grade teacher, Mrs. Kvale, pronounced her name “KWAH-lee”. She was a veteran teacher with the same hairstyle as my mother and Queen Elizabeth, a sort of curly bouffant. I enjoyed learning and did well enough in spelling to be sent to the second grade classroom for it. I was very upset to misspell the word, “float”, on a test there. It was the only word I missed, spelling it “flote” according to the phonics I knew at the time.
For second grade I attended Miss Fairchild’s class, a gifted and talented class of mixed first and second graders. Some students were a year younger than me. We were in many of the same classes later. My class’s future valedictorian and salutatorian were also there, best friends with each other. I had a crush on one of them, and followed him around until he commented, “You like me, don’t you?” He was not mean, just curious and possibly a little annoyed; I felt terribly embarrassed. I lost all fond feeling for him on the spot.
Third grade was with Mrs. Lechner, a short woman with long blonde hair. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons or snaps. She kept a library shelf of books and I read a lot of them. I pored over the human body book so much that later I looked for a similar book for my children. Alas, it was horribly out of date by then. She awarded stickers for good work, many of them scented scratch-n-sniff. My best friend and I taped our stickers to our wooden desktops, then drew on the tape when we were bored. At the end of the year I carefully untaped all my stickers and stuck them on a piece of paper to take home.
We had a large class that had to be divided, while the classes before and after our year were smaller. Mr. Kunkel taught the A class of fourth grade. By 10 years old, we knew we were sorted by expected performance in school. Being children, we simplified this to intelligence. One of the 11 year olds bragged that he had flunked specifically so he could be in Mr. Kunkel’s class. He said the school would not put a held-back child into the same teacher’s class again. Mr. Kunkel was objectively the better teacher for us. He taught enthusiastically and he made it interesting. We did special projects: a haunted alley in our coatroom, a marble racetrack built by us out of toilet paper tubes. He awarded the best speller with a prize at the end of the year. Another girl and I constantly traded wins in spelling bees. I finally won the prize.
