Una entrada menos pesada

Ok, ok, so Wednesday's entry was a wittow heavy, so something less so for the weekend:

In School Suspension: an Elementary Memory

Preface: so I only know one person who regularly reads my blog who will identify with all these specific memories, but here goes:

It must have been fourth grade. I had just come back to my Elementary school five houses away from my red-bricked one, my Elementary school teeming with white kids, having spent three years at Mahon Elementary on the East Side of town, where I was one of two white kids at least two of my years there. (First grade, it was just CJ Hargrove and me, and second grade, Dominic Zeni joined us. No idea why we were all there, the only white tiny faces on the "bad" side of town, but hell, I knew no color-boundaries. Especially since my parents pulled me out of my kindergarten class because my teacher Mrs. Cunningham? Cummings? would go bonkos if I colored "outside the lines" in our coloring book projects. Hrm...). Well to make a long story short, even though the Lubbock School District was busing for "integration" in 1993, they were busing class loads of kids, so that in third grade, the entire class was white, from the West Side of town, bused from Rush Elementary (fourth grade was from my home elementary Hardwick): kids whose last names began with L-Z. Lubbock might have been a tad bit behind on the whole "integration" thing, but I've heard that it didn't even begin until 1989. Whoa).

So, fourth grade, I had just come from the "bad" side of town, having spent the last three years in and out of the principal's office for various antics, but getting away with much too much because I was a "responsive" student (meaning: I read on a level two grades above mine, a highly prized commodity at Mahon. Not sayin' it was right, just sayin' how it was), and had entered Hardwick: middle-class Whitedom. Where I got in trouble. A lot.

I think at one point my teachers were just fed up with my talking incessantly in class, and running into the boys' bathroom, and asking to get a drink of water only to wander the halls and peek into the other classrooms. Anyway, I don't remember the last infraction, just that my folder had been signed enough times (oh the phrase "Anne, go get your folder" I heard so much, and most of the time, I thought unfairly) that I was deserving of ISS: oh yes: IN SCHOOL SUSPENSION, a place only kids like Charles Giddens were supposed to be on familiar terms with.

ISS was in a closet. Seriously. A supply closet, cleaned out of supplies, with room enough for three kids' desks and one adult's desk, although teachers were never in there. They just poked their heads in to make sure all was well. Which meant that most of the time we were drawing or talking in whispers, and only hastily scratched out our assignments when there were fifteen minutes left in the day. Oh yes, we were given ISS essay assignments. I remember mine was: Why You Shouldn't Go To ISS (or something like that).

I was a little bullshitter even then. I remember writing some cause-and-effect crap like "If I go to ISS, then I will not be in class to make good grades. If I do not make good grades, then I will not get a good job. If I do not get a good job, then I will end up flipping burgers my whole life." (Little did I know, that as an English-Major-To-Be, the flipping burgers part would probably be in my future regardless of my grades). Oh to be sure, the essay was more involved and descriptive, probably using vocabulary words of the fourth-grade equivalent to those in my bullshit French Revolution paper for my Senior year in High School (which were, specifically, "carnage," "bloodbath," "massacre," and some other over-the-top descriptors that had no place in an academic treatise, high school or not, even though that paper earned me an "A-" and a comment in green: "Very vivid imagery". Ha.), but more or less, it was a bunch of crap, and I knew it, even at age ten, or eleven, or whenever it was.

Actually, I think I was in ISS more than once. One time in sixth grade for letting someone have the answers to my homework, or a test, or something. I remember Mrs. Nugent being appalled, but hey man, I just wanted to share the knowledge! (or maybe I just wanted acceptance from my peers, or maybe I was a sellout. Who knows).

But the point is. A few days after my first ISS incident and the bullshit essay (having been completed, of course, in the last fifteen minutes of the day), I was in my federally funded, poorly nutritional valued lunch-food line (ah, another place I heard "Anne, go get your folder!" for once having said to Katie, about the re-fried beans under the hot lamps, "wow, those beans look like crap." Well, they did!), and Mrs. Carmona came up to me and said "I read your ISS essay, Anne. It was really good. Thank you for putting in the effort." And I glowed with the pride of a bullshitter having been commended on a half-ass job.

Apparently, though, as I was later told, other kids in ISS had done much more poorly on their essays. One turned in an entire sheet of wide-ruled paper that had written on it "SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA" over and again.

Kudos, Anne Jones. Raising the bar, wherever she goes.