The Kindergarten Gulag

This photo speaks of the future, a future of twenty-five years of academic indentured servitude. I didn't know it when Mom snapped this picture of me and my Miss Piggy bag from G.B.'s. I ended up barfing all over this bag on the bus ride home.

Life before school, for me at least, was fun, filled with lots of things to do, and quite imaginative. I didn't have to deal with other kids except Crystal the biter and my cousins, and I got to read stories and make up stories, and play pretend, and have imaginary friends, and my whole world essentially revolved around that tiny farm on the side of the mountain.
School pretty much killed that little world for me in one fell swoop.

This photo is from the first day of Kindergarten. I had Mrs. Reish, a woman with a screechy voice and glasses and brown hair. She was a total throwback from the 1950s. We sat around the piano and sang songs from a 1950s song book, we had to sit "indian style" and walk "single file Indian style," and we sang "Ten Little Indians" and "Where Is Thumbkin?" and "I Know A Little Pussy" (which mysteriously cracked up my parents every time I sang it). We had to make our letters the right way and draw the right way and OPEN OUR CRACKER PACKETS THE RIGHT WAY AND PAINT THE RIGHT WAY AND PUT THINGS AWAY THE RIGHT WAY AAAAAND....

I never did things the right way, nor do I now. I am left-handed, and she'd give me scissors, those horrible lefty scissors with the green rubber coatings that never cut correctly. I'd never follow directions so my ditto projects never looked right - I remember cutting what was supposed to be a spiral ghost into complete ribbons. I got yelled at for not drawing a house "the right way." The purple dittoes we got, like word finds, never interested me. I could already read and count, so there wasn't much more for me to learn...except how to be social. Which I didn't want. Mrs Reish sent home a lot of report cards that said I was immature and socially backward. It didn't help matters much that the previous 5 years of isolation resulted in me catching every illness coming down the pike in 1984-1985. I spent a lot of time with bronchitis, earaches, headcolds, you name it. On top of that, that year we had a brutal winter and we were stranded by snow quite a bit. I think my parents got truancy warnings. (On top of that, my mom was pregnant with my little sister.)

We had to do a painting project for fall trees: paint the leaves by dabbing the already-painted-for-us trunk with sponges in different tempera paints. I apparently missed the "dabbing" part and ended up making my tree crazy psychedelic swirls. Because I "diiiidn't follow directionnnnns!!!!", my picture didn't end up in the hallway with the rest of the pictures, it ended up inside the room, unappreciated. This hurt me a lot as a little kid.

I had food allergies as a little kid. Anything containing red dye made me act like a complete animal. Mom and Dad always knew if my kindergarten snack involved Red Dye #2 because I'd bounce off the walls like a freak. They asked Mrs Reish to stop giving me crappy stuff like Hi-C and red Jell-o, and she couldn't understand why I wasn't allowed to eat that stuff.

Three things happened in Kindergarten that stuck out. The first was the day some kid in my class was acting up and then peed his pants, and Mrs Reish threatened that Mr. Zeek (the principal) would spank him and make him wear a diaper. We lived in terror of Mister Zeek. The second was, the gingerbread man hunt. There were laminated gingerbread men all over the school, and we had to find them, and we walked around in a large group, and then we walked past the furnace room, which was REALLY SCARY. Then - in April, we had the tornado drill, where we were given terrifying stories of potential tornadoes that would rip through and collapse the ceiling in the gym, which is why we had to sit in the hallway next to the gym for what seemed like an eternity, holding our arms over our heads, as if that would protect us from flying pieces of concrete.

At Christmas, we had to do a little performance of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas for the parents. I remember standing up there in front of everyone, singing this stupid song and wishing it was over. It was also probably the first instance of my long-standing love affair with "upstaging by making faces," something I got in trouble for a lot over the years.

I do remember at some point, things got really weird. I had to take a test with a lot of fill-in bubbles, and the other kids weren't taking the test. Mrs Reish made me sit in the play area to take it. It was boring, and I drew pictures in the booklet and on the scantron sheet, for which I got yelled at. I'm not sure what this test was, but it definitely changed the course of my elementary school life. I placed in the 98th percentile of some crap, which meant I had to sit in a room with a tall lady who looked like a bird and made me play with blocks for an hour while some older people asked me questions. The table I sat at was shaped like a trapezoid, and the chairs were plastic and bumpy.

Anyway, Kindergarten sucked.