Stories from the fifth grade

I woke up to a twitter trending topic this morning called 'In 1998 I..." I reflected on my own 1998 where I was a fifth grade student at St. Thomas Christian Academy, a subject that frequently appears in MyOK. I jogged my memory for something synonymous with 1998 and my fifth grade, but I couldn't come up with just one. I already wrote about one incident here, but there were plenty more that year.

My Love for Mrs. Perret
I was obsessed with my fifth grade teacher. Everyone was. In the small school where there were usually only two teachers per grade, I was quite upset when I was originally placed in Mrs. Schimko's class. She was a woman who would come to class with wet hair and long nails that screamed New Jersey. I made my mom call the school and switch me, which was usually not allowed, but don't underestimate Pam's persuasive powers.

Mrs. Perret was in her mid twenties with short, blond hair that lightly bobbed. She would wear light colored thin sweaters that always looked incredibly soft. Sometimes she would come along the back and put her arms on your desk to see what you needed help with. I would occasionally try to smell her, but it was difficult. I imagined that she probably smelled very nice.

I was an awkward, chubby kid, and my interactions with Mrs. Perret were never as slick as I intended them to be. I would overpower the pump hand sanitizer at her desk and it would squirt across the room. I had very thick transition lenses that never quite shifted into the 'glasses' part, so they were always slightly opaque with a tint of yellow. The deal breaker was after she had taught us a chapter on bones, I told her that I "found cartilage under my arm!" She very politely responded, "Hunny, I think thats fat."

Spanish/Philosophy
For special classes like Spanish, art, and computers, we would have separate teachers who we would visit. That year our Spanish teacher was a crazy, and she stayed like that until I graduated. This is the same woman that would repeatedly play The Neverending Story in Spanish without subtitles, so I never knew what the fuck was going on. In fifth grade she was in her philosophical phase, so everything had a meaning. She would later be perfectly personified into a fictional character by JK Rowling as Professor Trelawny.

One time Jeremy Bergmann went up to sharpen a pencil and she stopped teaching. Silence filled the room as she put down the chalk and slowly walked up to him. I briefly thought "Oh my God they are totally going to make out" and I'm not sure I was the only one. But instead she looked out to the class and stated something along the lines of "a pencil being a lifeline. We can use the lead without it being sharp, but how dull is too dull before we sacrifice the life of the pencil for the security of a sharp point?" The bitch was crazy. She also had an intense fear of earthquakes and made us get under our desks one time that year.

The Peace Table
Somehow the school allowed the recess supervisor Mrs. Carey to create a 'program' for the students. When two people would get into an argument they would sit down at a table and go through a list of questions like "Why are you angry?" or "What did you do to make the situation worse?" It was called 'The Peace Table' and it was promoted by the school and Mrs. Carey as a way of solving problems. I laughed this method off until I walked down the hallway one day and saw pictures of my friends on the bulletin board. They were Polaroids of their smiling faces underneath the words 'We found PEACE at the PEACETABLE!"

Mother fuckers. I wanted my picture of the bulletin board. So I set out to get in an argument that day with Stephen Krautle. I pretended as if he stole something from my pencil box and he quite passively apologized and said it must have been a mistake. Eventually I became so frustrated that I told him we HAD to go to the peace table for me to feel better about this. He sighed and told me he 'really didn't want to' then apathetically dragged himself to the table. We went though the steps and successfully got our photos up on the board.

Narcissism FTW.