School is the Weirdest

Given my recent foray/cannonball into this whole “kids exist and not just at the grocery store with their tiny shopping carts” thing I’m doing these days, it’s gotten me reminiscing about my days in elementary school.

(What in the actual world has this poor woman gotten herself into. Literally stop)

And, since I’m technically a grown up, I’ve started to realize that the “normal” things from 3^rd grade were in no way normal.

Art Class

Every child had the luxury of expanding their artistic minds for 45 minutes a week in art class. This expansion almost always involved a repurposed baby food jar with “paste” in it. What in the actual world was paste? What’s happening there? Is this driven by budget cuts? We have to take a post-apocalyptic approach to art supplies? Homemade glue was keeping this school afloat? We all had it too. It could not have tasted weirder and before you judge me for tasting it – everybody tasted it. It came in a food jar. It was arguably edible.

The most astonishing and intriguing part of art class was the kiln. Don’t you DARE touch the kiln. Don’t touch it, don’t go near it, don’t even look at it. You know what? Don’t even say kiln. Because a bunch of 53 pound 7 year olds have the ability to destroy a ceramic oven that is so heavy it had to be brought into the school with a crane. All I remember about it was that it was massive and it took eleven full days to bake my “Chinese pot” that I made for my mom, during which time the entire classroom was blazing hot at all times.

The Cafeteria

               Why do we look back on our times in the cafeteria with such fondness? I remember LOVING getting a school lunch. Cardboard flavored milk, a rectangle of pizza that is so undercooked the dough is still raw, those weird Lorna Doone cookies with the holes in them that you put on your finger like it’s a ring and eat. The cup of ice cream with the wooden “spoon” that was just a splinter factory for your tongue but you didn’t care because, ice cream. I flipping loved all of it.

I also really loved when the cafeteria would get too loud. We would all see it coming. The teachers would start by standing at the front of their class’s table and making threats they couldn’t legally keep. Then the scariest teacher would stand on the stage and scream that “the 4^th grade class down the hall is taking a test and they can hear us! This is not how young ladies and gentlemen behave”. As if an 8 year old’s compassion for other children taking standardized testing was going to be what stopped the ruckus. Then the best part. For WHATEVER reason, like Alzheimer’s patients, teachers forgot what happened last time, and decide that the only possible way to quiet the crowd is by SHUTTING OFF ALL THE LIGHTS.

Which was a jackpot. Every single child knew what that meant. It meant you could scream at the top of your lungs and not get caught. And there was always that one girl who legitimately cried about it. I just remember being like “You have got to get it together, you’re never going to make it in the real world, Tiffany”.

Presidential Fitness Test

I hated this. Mainly because I was above average in just about every way you could measure a 7 year old, except I had the flexibility of an 86 year old woman who just had her hip replaced and my arms were just for show – no actual strength associated with those noodles. So the V-Sit crushed me. 

To the point where I would be willing to snap my hamstring in order to reach whatever threshold I had to reach to achieve greatness and would still miss it to the extent that my mom had to sign a permission slip to allow me to be so inflexible. Also, pull ups. Come. On. They’d be like “Ok Ainsley, you have to do 3 pull ups”.  No, by all means. Let’s attempt that. I couldn’t even effectively hang from the pull up bar for 10 seconds. Much less pull my actual self up and over it 3 times. This was just a slap in the face that no matter what, I was physically inferior and this fact is confirmed by the President of the United States of America.