classes

I used to believe when you were first born your parents would ask you if you wanted to go to school or not. I was so jealous of my cousin (her parents schooled her).

Grace

My first day at school was really traumatic, I clinged onto my mother's skirt so that she wouldn't leave. She turned to me and said "you'd better get used to it because you're here for the next eighteen years". I really thought that I wouldn't see her again for eighteen years.....

BigSis

Up until I was in the second grade I understood multiple choice questions that asked "which number is bigger?" to mean which digits were larger. I would measure them with a ruler and circle the 'biggest' one. My 2nd grade teacher saw me doing this and asked why. When I explained she corrected me, saying they wanted the number that meant 'more'. DUH. Well hey, this sure simplified these tests!

VLB

When I was really young, my older brother told me it was illegal to write on the left side of the margin on paper...and so in grade one, when my teacher told us to number our paper by putting numbers in the left margin, I yelled out to the class, "No, don't do it! You'll get arrested!"
Of course, they all laughed at me...but I still believed it.

Jenn

I always heard the phrase "honor roll" as "on a roll". It made sense to me that if a person had mostly B's they would get a certificate saying "B On a Roll" like, "hey you're getting a lot of b's you're on a roll".

When my neighbor got a D on his report card, I asked him if there was a D "On a roll" and he punched me. Lessons learned the hard way.

Nicole

At the end of first grade, I was told I was going to skip second grade. The first day of school, when my mom came to wake me up I was very confused. I thought I got a year off for being smart and could stay home and play all year!

Anon

I always wondered how it was that women could get bachelor's degrees. And I wondered how it was that my dad was trying to get one when he was married to my mom. I thought they were going to have to get divorced when he got his bachelor's degree.

Donna

I went to a private school until the 4th grade, and I belived that kids at public schools had a chain with a metal ball clamped to their shoeless feet as they roamed graffiti covered hallways with passed out junkies on the floor with needles sticking out of their arms. All the kids at public school wore filthy rags and had dirty messed-up hair. The teachers would beat them for no reason. Everytime I got in trouble at school my parents would scream "DO YOU WANT US TO SEND YOU PUBLIC SCHOOL?" I would cry and say no, I would beg them not to send me to public school.

Geister

I was scared to go to kindergarden because i thought you had to dress up like a vegetable and sit in the dirt all day

tom

When we'd go past our primary school in the evening the lights would always be on. My dad told my sister and i that at night a whole new set of children would go to the school and be taught there with a totally new set of teachers and even diffrent wall displays so they didn't know about the 'day children.' These according to my dad were the children of people who worked nights but we weren't allowed to say anything because it was supposed to be a secret. I belived him for such a long time and even looked for the wall displays of the night children.

Lyra

In 2nd gr. we had a "Fire Safety Day" and fireman came to our school. Now I had no idea of what to do, so I listened carefully. He said we should "Stop, Drop, and Roll" but I heard it as "Stop Droppenrole" and thought "Droppenrole" was a guy who went everywhere started fires. I believed this till I was in 7th grade.

The littlest dipstick

When I was in elementary school, I had to do a monthly IQ test. Every time the guys from the Education Department came to my school and asked me to do the test they said "Wow" when they saw that my IQ was nearby 140. I was very worried about that because I thought 140 was too high (like blood pressure) and I always asked them to check my answers again. They always said, "for god's sake, you expect more points !??!?"

Persian Buddy

I used to believe that whenever I got an F on a test it stood for fantastic.

megan

My teacher told me that if you drew two straight lines on a page that were not parallel lines, they would eventually cross one another if you made them long enough. She said that if the page was not big enough, you could extend the lines on the floor and you would see that eventually they would cross. I thought I was smarter than mathematicians because I knew that if you needed a lot of space to extend the lines, you could have to go around the world, in which case they would cross in two places! I thought I might win the Nobel Prize for my theory.

Els

I used to believe when someone got "kicked out" of school, the principal would literally grab you by the shirt and actually kick you out of the building!

Boomer

I believed that the numbers 0 to 100 either were a tower or lived in a tower (it was a bit vague), with each 10 numbers having a floor each. The numbers at the bottom, the single digit numbers, always wanted to get to the top, to defeat the evil 100 and his henchman 99. So they would work together to get there, through multiplication. For example 6 would multiply with 7 to get to the 40s level at 42, which was a rather dark and dingy place with a low ceiling. At this point 7 would thank 6 and multiply himself by himself to get to 49, from which he could pull himself up to the 50s floor, a grand hall with marble columns. For some reason I pictured him and 8 then having a cup of tea there. It got weirder with some of the other numbers though. I imagined 5 as the real hero of the group, and for him was the greatest challenge - the 80s floor was a harem of seductive numbers, all throwing themselves at him, tempting him to stay. But 5 would steadfastly go on, pushing past up to the 90s floor where he would confront 100 and save the day. At this point the correspondence to real mathematics was gone and it was just a story in my head. I've never really been any good at maths since then...

HB

At my school, the office lady would get on the intercom at the end of school and say "Prepare for dismissal now. Bus riders go first."

My ENTIRE year of kindergarten I thought she was saying "Prepare for this missile." and I remember thinking, "Oh no! What missile??" And BEGGING my mom to let me take the bus so I could escape first. I thought the school just favored the people who took the bus and let them get out first in case of a missile attack.

Kat

When I learned that I was going to have to go to school, I was overjoyed to find out that it was called 'Candygarden'.

I imagined a wonderful place with candy growing everywhere and free for the taking.

That turned out to be my first lesson in real disappointment.

bob dobbs

When I was in kindergarten and my sister was in second grade, we found a worm in the yard and put it in a cup of dirt to look at it. She claimed she could communicate with the worm through an elaborate series of head movements. She promised me that I too would be taught this language in second grade.

Second grade came. Every day I waited for my teacher to get in front of the class and say "Attention everyone! We're not having math today, kids, because we'll be learning worm language."

Every day I thought, "This has to be the worm language day."

The day never came.

I'm still bitter.

Tom

When I was in first grade, we had our first fire drill. I knew it had to do with practicing what to do in case there was a real fire, but I couldn't figure out what the "drill was for." I thought for certain that giant drills were going to come out of the ceiling and put a huge hole in the center of our desks. (I'm really not sure how that would put out the fire.) When we had our first fire drill, I couldn't wait to see the giant holes in the desks! After finding the room intact, I just assumed that the drills were magical and didn't leave holes in the desks. I think I believed this until I was 9. D'oh!

Salad