Memories of a Compound Assignment
By: Michael Cottle
When I was a young whipper-snapper, I began in the first grade. As a kid before this journey, I spent little time reading or anything of that nature, and what little bit that I did learn probably came from PBS. I only watched this station because I liked tales of the Amazing Spider-Man. Sometimes they’d show this, and sometimes they wouldn’t. It took me awhile to figure out they only showed it on certain days. I thought the rest was fairly lame stuff that I could do with or without.
So regardless, I never went to kindergarten or preschool. My vague memory of ever doing this fiasco was a miserable memory. There were too many kids there, and I didn’t like them. They made me uncomfortable. I was lucky that I had Grandparents. They watched me- sometimes, and a cousin, and other times I had free reign of the West Watson street. So I was ill pre-pared when I started first grade. I was put in this thing that they called Group II Reading.
I was comfortable with this. The dumb kids were in Group III Reading, and all of the smarty pants were in Group I Reading, but here I was stuck in Group II -just your average Joe of a kid, nothing more and nothing less. One thing I loved to do was get my palms real sweaty, and then drag them down on the top of my desk. It would create some kind of a racket until Mrs. Nichols had enough, and then she would come with a ruler and tear my palm up from one side to the other. I suppose it helped to dry the sweat off. When we were really good, she would bring us cookies and milk. That was the way we rolled back in the day. She was really sweeter than she was mean.
That was first grade, so about the first week that I was in second grade, the new teacher gave us this worksheet with a bunch of words in squares. We were to color in the compound words. Some of us were still dreaming of summer vacation, but our teacher was prancing around the room in a frenzy of a sort. “Ya’ll should know this stuff already! I’m sending all of you back to first grade!”
I suppose that her tirade is very reason that I recall this whole memory so very vividly. I had no idea what was going on at the time. In the squares, the compound words spelled out the word “Ti”. Just like that, with a capital ‘T’ and a lowercase ‘i’. I had one other word that I was for sure was a compound word, but the kid next to me pointed at it and said most confidently, “That ain’t no compound word.”
“Sure it is” I said, defending my position. “’Clim-bed’ is…” my voice trailed off. I realized before I even said it, that this made absolutely no sense. I scratched this compound from my colored in squares, and turned in the paper.
Unfortunately, I was allowed to stay in the second grade, but realized that it was going to be a long, long year.
By: Michael Cottle
When I was a young whipper-snapper, I began in the first grade. As a kid before this journey, I spent little time reading or anything of that nature, and what little bit that I did learn probably came from PBS. I only watched this station because I liked tales of the Amazing Spider-Man. Sometimes they’d show this, and sometimes they wouldn’t. It took me awhile to figure out they only showed it on certain days. I thought the rest was fairly lame stuff that I could do with or without.
So regardless, I never went to kindergarten or preschool. My vague memory of ever doing this fiasco was a miserable memory. There were too many kids there, and I didn’t like them. They made me uncomfortable. I was lucky that I had Grandparents. They watched me- sometimes, and a cousin, and other times I had free reign of the West Watson street. So I was ill pre-pared when I started first grade. I was put in this thing that they called Group II Reading.
I was comfortable with this. The dumb kids were in Group III Reading, and all of the smarty pants were in Group I Reading, but here I was stuck in Group II -just your average Joe of a kid, nothing more and nothing less. One thing I loved to do was get my palms real sweaty, and then drag them down on the top of my desk. It would create some kind of a racket until Mrs. Nichols had enough, and then she would come with a ruler and tear my palm up from one side to the other. I suppose it helped to dry the sweat off. When we were really good, she would bring us cookies and milk. That was the way we rolled back in the day. She was really sweeter than she was mean.
That was first grade, so about the first week that I was in second grade, the new teacher gave us this worksheet with a bunch of words in squares. We were to color in the compound words. Some of us were still dreaming of summer vacation, but our teacher was prancing around the room in a frenzy of a sort. “Ya’ll should know this stuff already! I’m sending all of you back to first grade!”
I suppose that her tirade is very reason that I recall this whole memory so very vividly. I had no idea what was going on at the time. In the squares, the compound words spelled out the word “Ti”. Just like that, with a capital ‘T’ and a lowercase ‘i’. I had one other word that I was for sure was a compound word, but the kid next to me pointed at it and said most confidently, “That ain’t no compound word.”
“Sure it is” I said, defending my position. “’Clim-bed’ is…” my voice trailed off. I realized before I even said it, that this made absolutely no sense. I scratched this compound from my colored in squares, and turned in the paper.
Unfortunately, I was allowed to stay in the second grade, but realized that it was going to be a long, long year.