Weirdos are Living in My House

Chapter 2: School

The weirdos didn't come for awhile, so I'm going to tell you about the before bit.

My proper school was very nice. My grade four teacher, Mrs. McKinnon, was very nice, and the teacher before her, my grade three teacher, Mrs. Parmar, was even nicer. I also liked my grade one teacher, even though I couldn't remember her name, but I didn't much care for my grade two teacher, Mrs. Teeple. She didn't think I was very smart, because I printed my letters so you could read them in a mirror. I could read them without a mirror and I could also read words in books when they were the right way round, so if you ask me, if she could only read words when they were the right way round, and needed a mirror to read my printing, she wasn't as smart as she thought she was, and she probably wasn't even as smart as me. Plus, she said I was cheeky, which might have been fair, but it wasn't nice of her. She hurt my feelings. I had to sit by her desk one day and tell her what words I'd printed on a worksheet. She had a big red pen, and she marked big Xs on the things I got wrong, and made little ticks on the things I got right. You're not supposed to say that teachers are mean, but Mrs. Teeple was capital "m" mean. In the playground, we called her Mrs. Teapot, and she looked sort of like one. She was round and had a bun on the top of her head like the knob on a teapot lid. I had also gone to kindergarten, in the classroom of a church that wasn't the one we went to, but all I remember were the naps, which I didn't like, and the fuss everyone made when I walked home instead of waiting for someone to come and get me. My mom said going to kindergarten would make me smarter, but it didn't work. Alan, who was in my class and who once called the teacher Mommy, and everyone laughed, was much smarter than me, and he didn't have to go to kindergarten and take naps.

At first, my school - Canalta Elementary, it was called, was not very big. Then school let out for the summer when I was in grade three, and when in started again for grade four, there was a new one that wasn't ready yet, so we took buses into town and had school in a building that wasn't really a school. It was the old school board office. On the first day, one of the boys went into the washroom, and someone hadn't flushed the toilet from who knows how long ago! We all went in and looked, and it was nasty. The teacher came in to see what on earth we were all doing in there, so the excitement didn't last long. The teacher flushed and the toilet gurgled as though it might be plugged, but it wasn't, so we all went back to our desks. I don't know how long we went to school in that building, but after that not much interesting happened. We didn't have a playground. There were no swings or even a field to play Red Rover, and we weren't allowed to leave the school grounds and go to Kresges or Woolworths. We played hopscotch in the parking lot at lunchtime, and one Wednesday a stranger in a car with with the wrong color of licence plates saw us and came over to ask where he could have lunch? We told him he couldn't have lunch because it was Wednesday, and all the stores and restaurants were closed. He didn't seem to understand, but we stopped talking to him because the teacher was coming. Even teachers know you're not supposed to talk to strangers, so what my parents were doing bringing them home, after we moved to Vancouver, I do not know. My grandma - the proper Dawson Creek one - said that there were things that a person just could not fathom, and this was one of them.

When we did get into our new school, it was beautiful. It was brand new and smelled of paint and carpets, not gym clothes and peanut butter sandwiches. If you didn't get caught, you could run and slide clear across the gym floor in your socks, without getting snagged on any rough bits. Everything was brand new and bright, even the desks and chairs. The chairs were orange, and the walls were blue - and - here was something interesting - the walls moved! On the first day we were in the new school, it was one huge room. We all sat in the middle, and the principal talked to us for awhile, and then each class went to different parts of the big room. The principal called it "open concept" and we were all supposed to be learning together, but it didn't work. If your class was supposed to be doing arithmetic, but the teacher in the next class was reading an interesting story, the story won your attention, and if the class on the other side was singing, well you could just forget about arithmetic, which was my favorite thing to do about arithmetic anyways. After a few days, we came into school and there were walls between the classrooms, but they moved back and made one big room again if there was an assembly. I missed the stories. That other teacher was a good reader. We got used to the new school and after the winter it smelled more of snow boots and forgotten lunches and less of new paint but it was still pretty nice.