School Happenings

Working at a school has brought up a lot of memories of my own schooldays:

Going to first and second grade in a war-torn country was quite an experience. First we had to make it to school. For a while, this meant going through a checkpoint manned by soldiers who wanted to see our passports every morning. Once we got to school, it was often a difficulty staying there. There were a lot of strike days when my parents had to come back just a few hours later and pick us up.

Being at school could also be dangerous. Soldiers tear-gassed our playground several times that I remember, and once the bomb sirens went off and we all had to don gasmasks.

Also, discipline was enforced through slaps across the face and rulers across the hands. (I never got slapped and was only rulered once during an all-class punishment.)

Third and fourth grade were in a different city that was a lot more stable. Still, discipline was the same, and the kids were pretty rough. Every Saturday we walked home from school because it took the bus over an hour to go the one mile.

I homeschooled for a while, and that was great. Mom and Dad rented a little room downstairs from our apartment, and we did school there. I remember spending a lot of time coming up with “extra-curricular” activities, such as watching a swarm of ants attack a centipede-like bug that was very poisonous.

When I was in junior high, I attended a VERY conservative Christian school. We watched movies about the end times and how Halloween is the Satanists’ “high holy day” and how all rock music was based on satanic rhythms and was “Hell’s Bells.” One other movie I watched there was about how the United States government has concentration camps scattered throughout America that are just waiting to be filled with Christians.

I LOVED high school. There were students there who had lived all over the world. One day in Math class we discovered that we could say the “Hail Mary” in eight different languages.

I had one teacher who was terrified of birds, which was unfortunate, because his classroom had a balcony where the pigeons liked to land. It was amusing.

Another teacher, during his second week there, refused to let us leave the class when the fire alarm went off. When he finally let us go about ten minutes later, we discovered there was a real fire in the building.

I remember a friend hiding under her desk when fighter planes flew over. One year we attended a funeral for a schoolmate. We put on a lot of Shakespeare plays. I was in our bell choir.

Schooldays were some of the best days of my life.