In
second grade, my teacher was Mrs. Howard. The best word to describe
her is proper. She was very no-nonsense, serious about her
task of getting second grade across to her students.
Here is our class picture. It is amazing when I look at it now that I
can still name 18 of the 24 kids in that picture! That's me on the far right of the first row.
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| Mrs. Howard's Second Grade Class |
The
most lasting memory I have of second grade took place in winter. Just
like in first grade, there was a wall in the classroom along which we
hung up our coats and left our boots during the snowy, wet weather.
Waiting
for the bus on winter mornings was very cold – almost to the point
of abusive! And one morning when we got to school, a
classmate, who I will call Tyler, started to cry when we were
hanging up our coats and taking off our boots. Mrs. Howard asked what
was wrong? And Tyler said his hands were cold! Now, we aren't
talking a little bit cold. If his hands were cold enough to make him
cry, then they had to have been very very cold – Tyler was
scared that something bad had happened because his hands had been so cold for
so long.
Mrs.
Howard rushed him over to the little sink that was next to the
students' bathroom and turned on the water. Tyler put his hands in
the stream of water. Then he reached over to turn on the hot water
faucet. A very logical move, I thought. But Mrs. Howard did the
strangest thing! She told him not to turn on the hot
water! She said to only run the cold water. She said the hot
water would burn his hands!
Now
that sounded to me like the silliest, most illogical thing I
had ever heard! Tyler's hands were cold. If he ran hot water
over them, his hands would get warm, and then he could take his hands
out of the water and they would not burn. But NO, the teacher said to
run the cold water on the cold hands and that would
warm them up.
That
made no sense, no sense at all! Why did grown-ups have to be so
contradictory? Why did life in the real world have to be so the
opposite of way it seemed it should be?
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20150222 Second Grade
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