Year Meme, part 1

[owl]

bulky_monster asked for 1989.

I was in Mrs G.'s P2 class at the start of this year. I remember that the story corner had very scratchy carpet tiles in alternating orange and olive squares, and we each had a handful of plastic counters we used to do "sums", which we kept on the windowsill in little pots with our names on. Mrs G. had red curly hair; she was killed four years later in a collision on the A1, leaving a son the same age as me and a daughter a couple of years younger.

After the summer I moved up to Miss N.'s class. She was my favourite teacher in primary school. At the end of the year I cried when I was told that I was going to be moved up into Mrs M's P4/P5 class instead of staying in Miss N's P3/P4 class. The idiot headmaster read out the list in the middle of the class instead of just sending a letter home to the parents.

Miss N. used to write "Fried-egg day" on the blackboard instead of "Friday" and see who spotted it first. In science once, she was explaining about things soaking up liquids, and I piped up-not showing off, I was trying to be helpful-"Actually, it's called absorption." I imagine some teachers might have found me unbearably precocious, but not Miss N. One day in craft, when everyone else was trying to make clay giraffes and elephants, I made an abstract structure with loops and points, painted it in rainbow colours, and called it a "Nothing-in-Particular". Miss N., possibly tired of reconstructing more ambitious artworks, held it up as an excellent idea.

Unlike other teachers, she gave me enough work to prove I knew how to do it and not enough to make me bored. After you had finished your work, you were allowed to play quietly with construction toys (Meccano and Sticklebrix type things, I think) at the back, or go on the BBC computer which was the height of the school's technology. Tiny screen, immense keyboard. The floppy disks really were floppy and had a distressing tendency to wipe themselves if they were left too close to a magnetic source, like, oh, the monitor. If you wanted to print, it was a dot matrix which printed out on a strip of flimsy paper with holes punched down the side. Our favourite game was something like Space Invaders, where you had do give the correct answer to a simple sum before you got to shoot the descending aliens. Ah, education.

At Christmas the school put on a play: Heidi. Most of the rest of my class were sheep (costumes mostly composed of cotton-wool), but I and an obnoxious little boy called Richard were narrators. The parents were supposed to provide the costumes. My mother, who was about 7 months pregnant with my little brother, was despairing at the thought of having to sew a Swiss outfit. So she prayed, went to Marks and Spencers-and found that they were doing Swiss-themed clothes for little girls. I had a white blouse, and black velvet sleeveless bolero, and a red skirt with trimmed with black braid embroidered with flowers. I wore it to church for a year or two after the play.

This was also the first year that I paid any attention to anything going on in the news. I remember watching both the Exxon Valdez oil spill and-I think, live-the Berlin Wall going down. Also on television, although I can't say for certain that it was in 1989, I saw a programme about how space probes were launched, with the different fuel stages falling away, and for the first time I realised how huge and lonely space was.

Comments

[bulky-monster.livejournal.com]

That's pretty awesome! It's such a vivid reminder, for me, of grade school.

I think the first major news event I really remember was the Challenger blowing up, but I think I do remember the Berlin wall coming down, too. Somebody bought my dad a "souvenir" piece of rubble. Or maybe he bought it himself, but that would've been weird and out of character for him.

Sounds like you were a smart little rugrat :)

[owl]

I had just discovered that reading reference books makes you know stuff :)

[bulky-monster.livejournal.com]

That's cool. I tried that, but I had no attention span. It was all about "not living up to potential."

Of course, I devoured any kind of book that told a story.