it is not beneath my dignity to climb a tree.

when i was in the third grade, about a month into the schoolyear, the school broke up the class i was in and dispersed us. the word on the playground was our teacher got reassigned to kindergarten. in retrospect, "your teacher has been reassigned to kindergarten" sounds a lot like "your dog has gone to live on a farm". bottom line, we were dispersed.

the morning of the day the dispersal was to take place, my mother told me, "don't you let them put you in with mrs duncan. don't let them put you in the class your brother was in." well, i guess you know the punchline, but hell, i was like 8 years old. i told them my mama said don't put me in that class. it didn't work.

so i was plopped into the already-in-process class of mrs duncan and miss pitts. this was the 70s - open classrooms and teamwork were all the rage. we had a cavernous room strewn with tables that sat 6 per. being the sort of kid that thrives in a library carrel, this was problematic.

but, i found my place.

one of my favourite activities was this set of self-driven reading comprehension exercises that miss pitts had on her side of the classroom. there were three boxes filled with laminated pages. you had to finish box one to get to box two, finish box two to get to box three. the more you finished, the higher your marks. you couldn't just do them all day - you got to do them only after you'd finished your regular work.

i ate them up.

remember SRA? well, this was like SRA, but it was something miss pitts had made. i have no idea why she made her own SRAs. maybe she was a cheapskate. maybe she rolled her own SRAs so that she had more money for chalk. maybe she was embezzling.

ANYWAY. three boxes. box one. box two. box three. to get an A, you had to finish all three boxes.

when we exiled-teacher refugees first arrived in the domain des pitts, ol' miss pitts specifically told us we didn't have to finish all the cards like the other children did. we started late, so we'd be held to a different standard. getting into box three was enough. we didn't have to finish it.

when the time came to fill out report cards, miss pitts conveniently forgot this, resulting in my painfully and tearfully explaining to my parents why i got a poor mark. my memory is that they didn't really buy the "she told us we didn't have to" explanation and simultaneously didn't really care that i didn't get an A.

that school year lived up to its inauspicious start and comprised my first lesson in the fact that adults are untrustworthy assholes. i should never have been in that class in the first place! that's when i decided to never grow up, because i don't want to wear a tie or a serious expression in the middle of july.