classes

When I was in elementary school, there were four water fountains side by side. They were labeled "Coffee, tea, milk shake, pee". "Milkshake" had the strongest flow, so everyone wanted to drink from the third fountain. "Pee" just trickled out, but sometimes some hapless kid would drink out of it. If he did, he would be teased for the rest of the day.

(Jacob, did you happen to go to the same school as I went to: Hillside School, in Berkeley, CA? Or was it a more widespread phenomenon?)

Kdees

When I was in elementry school, there were 4 drinking fountains set side by side...Each fountain had a title, in this order: 1.Coffee,2.Tea,3.Soda Pop,4.Pee......If you drank from one of the fountains, you were sad to have been drinking that flavored drink..No matter how big the lines were at the fountains, we would stay away from the "Pee" titled fountain....Sometimes some of us forgot about the titles and we laughed at and teased all day long for drinking "Pee"..YUCK!

Jacob

I beleive it was third grade that we progressed to cursive writing but I must have been impatient to get on with it because I turned in my first assignment in cursive on an occasion when we weren't asked to use cursive. I hadn't yet learned all the tricks of this new writing style but I was trying to show off anyway. My balloon got burst big time when the teacher pointed out that there were supposed to be spaces between each word not just between sentences. You see I had strung all the letters in my sentences together sothewordswereconnectedtoo

M Dowd, SF,CA

I remember when we had our first fire drill in school. The teacher told us that when the alarm rings, we would have to leave the classroom in an orderly fashion and walk (not run!) into the playground. Having never heard the term "fire drill" before, I thought that we were being taken outside to see a power drill that made holes with fire rather than with a drill bit. It sounded so cool. I was sure disappointed when I found out what we were actually doing!

Kdees

I wanted to learn how to read so badly that I came home from my first week in Kindergarten crying because I hadn't learned yet. After all my mother had been teling me I'd learn to read when I started school...

Ladybug2535

When I was 4 there was talk of me skipping kindergarten and going straight to first grade. I was terrified at the thought of being with the older kids primarily because I was positive that, since I was younger, everyone else would tower above me and I'd only come up to the middle of their shins. Those first-graders are mighty intimidating, I tell you what.

P7A77

As I was a child at the age of 2 or 3 years my brother (who is three years older than me) was put to school. So my relatives asked me if I was already keen on going to school, too. My answer must have been quite surprising for them and it was about this:
"No, that´s not a good place to be - everyone who is put to school looses his teeth."

After all, maybe there´s really a causal coherence and school is just a enormous tooth-fairy-conspiracy to get the childrens´ teeth.


Well, that was a really strange thing to believe in and I wonder if anyone else did!?

Aoul

I was young when President Reagan was shot. At my grammar school it was said that kids at ‘the high school’ had clapped when they heard the news. I didn’t understand the politics of it all and only knew that it was horrible that a human being had been shot. I thought that ‘the high school’ must be this incredibly frightening orgy of violence – think ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ crossed with ‘Spartacus’ – that was orchestrated, encouraged and graded (!!) by the teachers. What else could bring people to applaud the assassination of a president?

kids, hah!

this is actually my mom's old childhood belief. In third grade, her class was located in a portable building which had housed the special education class the year before. My mother was the youngest of five girls. Ergo, her sistgers convinced her that she had been retarded from birth and that nobody had wanted to tell her. Idunno how long she fell for it, but knowing my mom, it may have been some time.

Ambrosia

I remember an exercise in class where we had to measure the length of our foot with a 1-foot-ruler. I was absolutely confused as to why we needed to, since a foot must be a foot long!

PS - By the time I was older I was actually quite gifted at mathematics - true.

Dave

When I was a little girl, my mum and dad told me that if I was naughty, I would go to the "naughty girls school" and would point it out when we drove past it. I always thought, gosh that's small, they must just cram them in like sardines. It wasn't until I was 18 and going past it on the bus that I realised it was a Gas Sub Station (those little green huts).

Helen Yates (UK)

WHEN I WAS IN 1ST GRADE A LADY CAME INTO OUR CLASS AND ASKED IF ANYONE HAD ALREADY BEEN IN SPEECH THERAPY.I RAISED MY HAND WITH SOME OTHERS AND TO MY HORROR I HAD TO GO WITH THEM. I NEVER HAD SPEECH CLASS NOR DID I NEED IT. I THOUGHT I WOULDN'T HAVE TO GO IF I'D ALREADY BEEN THERE.THEY SENT ME BACK TO MY CLASS.

DEBBIE

I used to believe teachers wouldn't assign homework if someone missed class, because the missing student wouldn't know what to do, and that wouldn't be fair, would it? I actually missed a homework assignment in 4th grade because of this; I didn't bother checking on the blackboard for the assignment, because I just *knew* we didn't have any homework. My mom had to explain to me that the missing kid would have to make up the work when s/he got back to school, which I thought was just a travesty of justice.

joy

when i was about 3 i used to think that your age went along with what grade you were in. you were 1 year old in 1st grade,2 years old in 2nd grade,3 years old in 3rd grade, 4 years old in 4th grade ect. ect.

this was reinfored when my dad told me that i wasnt in school becuase i was too smart and not because i wasnt old enough

smartypants

When my sister who is 2yrs older than me started school at the at the age of 6 she would come home with stories of going into the hall for morning prayers,maybe it was an accent thing (we live in newcastle) but i was convinced she and all the school stood round a huge hole in the middle of the school and prayed not to fall in.

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