Sharing Memories: Playing Hooky in Grade 2 and 3

My personal journal

Here is a Challenge for all genealogy bloggers. Keep a weekly journal called Sharing Memories. Some of you may recall that in 2010, 2011 and 2012 I provided weekly prompts to help with writing up memories of ancestors and ourselves. 

Think how excited one of your descendants will be to read about YOU - your memories and your stories.

If you write your own blog and you are participating in this challenge, please use the hashtag #52SharingMemories if you are posting on Twitter or Google+  That way I can provide links to your blog posts at the end of the week. You can of course post your stories as comments on this blog post or in a private journal. It's your choice! The important thing is to WRITE! 

This week I'm writing about my experiences in Grades 2 and 3. I'm combining them because I have very mixed memories of those years and can't actually recall very much! But my descendants might chuckle to think of the entire class sitting in nice neat little rows, one wooden desk behind the other. We raised our hands to ask questions, did not speak unless given permission and politely stood at the side of our desks when talking.

 What I do remember vividly is that I was bored and decided to liven things up. First I locked all the stall doors in the girls' bathroom. It's easy to do - you lock them from the inside then crawl out underneath the doors. Yep. I thought it would be fun. Of course I was caught. Someone saw me and told my teacher. I decided to lie my way out of it with a "it's my word against hers" stance, but since I had convinced another student to help me lock the doors, and she caved when questioned, it became my word against two other kids. I lost. It makes me chuckle now to think how brazen I was! And honestly I didn't grow up to be a habitual liar.

But that didn't stop me. i was so bored that I decided I wasn't going to school anymore. I enlisted a friend's help in this caper too. I would head off to school every morning but take a detour to my friend's house. Her parents worked so no one was home. She'd let me in, then off she'd go to school. I would hide out in her bedroom reading comic books and eating chocolates! No wonder I detest chocolate now. 

I managed to play hooky for almost 2 weeks. Then the school phoned my parents to find out what illness I had and when I might be returning. Oops. I hadn't thought that far ahead! Believe it or not I didn't get into too much trouble. My parents were pretty good about sitting down and finding out WHY I played hooky at such a young age. When the truth came out - that I was bored silly - the school arranged for me to have my own reading program. I was so excited and happy, and after that I was a model student. 

Every day when the class took turns reading aloud from a very boring Dick and Jane reader, I was allowed to go to the back of the classroom and read stories from some reading series (wish I could remember what it was called), then answer questions about each story. My teacher would check to be sure I was understanding and remembering what I read, and I'd carry on. So I could read at my own speed and my own level. By the end of Grade 3 I was reading at a Grade 7 level.

My days of being bored in school were over!