Day 310: memories of third grade

[maeve66]

Okay, I am finally aging out of this photo. But I don't think I have any photos from 3rd grade. Third grade was rough. We'd just moved from Madison to Evanston, and I did not make a smooth transition. My parents sent to me "summer camp", e.g. day camp at a park two blocks away which we called "The Tornado Slide Park" because it had one of those spiral slides. It also had a strange, bare white space with, I think, water nozzles in it at ground level, surrounded by a white painted iron fence, which I guess was for water play, but not swimming? It seems weird, now, in my memory. I hated that day camp, and the kids were mean, and I grew bitter that we'd moved. School was not much of an improvement on the summer. My teacher, Mrs. Rutledge, lived right next door to us, and I didn't much like her. She was Southern. Her son, Jonathan, was four years younger than me and a pain in the ass. She was a single mother, though I don't know if she was divorced or what. The only things I remember from her classroom are a) a reading program called SRA which was all about timed readings and answering content questions, and I enjoyed zooming through it and upping my reading speed and finishing the entire box of small, color-coded readings and questions, and b) I got in a fight with a boy who was later a major gang leader in Evanston, Jerry Wright, aka Peanut Wright, presumably because of his head shape. The fight consisted of him throwing a metal trashcan at me (I have absolutely no recollection of why) and me throwing it back. We were sent to Mr. Cherry, the principal, and we were terrified on our way to the Office, because both of us had heard and believed that Mr. Cherry practiced corporal punishment, with a paddle. We saw no such thing in his office. That's pretty much all I remember from third grade.