Kindergarten: Five Things. One lie.

In my previous post, I alluded to something I remember about kindergarten, noting that I don't remember much about the time I spent there.

Now that I think about it, I remember more than I originally estimated, but as far as actual events are concerned (and not general things like classmates' names or physical details of the rooms, etc.), I remember five of them, considering only one of them to be truly important.

One. We ate paste. When I was in kindergarten, in addition to having glue, we had adhesive paste. I never used it after kindergarten, and I don't recall either of my younger sisters using it when they were in elementary school, so ever since a few years after kindergarten I always thought that I was one of the very last people ever to use it. There's no way that's true, but I thought it for a long time.

Anyway, I remember the day we ate the paste. It was a group of four or five of us. It was regrettable and, in a surprising turn of events, minty.

Two. We ate crackers with butter on them. The crackers themselves were buttery, too; they weren't saltines. I have no idea why we did this. Now that I think about it, it's possible that someone my teacher knew made the butter. I think we may have been talking about making butter. Really, I think the whole thing was just a way for my teacher to have what was likely one of her favorite snacks. Why else would you talk about making butter with your kindergarten class?

Three. A girl named Katie threatened boys on the bus with a belt. She was the only Katie I went to elementary school with; there were Katherines and Kates, but no Katies - and she went to another school after kindergarten. She was wearing a dress, not any sort of garment that would require the wearing of a belt. Threatening boys on the bus by snapping a belt was such a good idea that she went out of her way to bring one to school - this couldn't wait until a day on which she might wear a belt anyway. That's almost as dumb as writing about this event in such a way that suggests that kindergarteners might voluntarily wear belts at some point.

Four. Stop, drop and roll. One day in kindergarten, we talked about fire safety. As one might expect, this eventually involved discussion of stopping, of dropping and of rolling. When I was in kindergarten, I was pretty happy to be at school. All the way through elementary, really. I liked it and I got a lot of satisfaction out of it. I was more than a little bit of a goodie-goodie. Almost as much of a goodie-goodie as my classmate who composed and sang a song in front of class at music time, the lyrics to which go like this:

I like school and school likes me,
I'm as happy as can be,
I like school and school likes me.

I still remember the melody.

The first (only?) time this got me in trouble came on the day we talked about stopping, dropping and rolling. On the bus home, I sat next to David Barker, who was blonde and tiny. We got to talking (and to getting excited) about stop, drop and roll.

At this point, I began to physically demonstrate in the bus seat. David Barker got a bloody nose. I don't need to tell you how funny it was.

Five. My teacher lied to me. My teacher lied to me and I will never, ever forget it.

We were using a particular type of plastic blocks. They were sort of Lego-ish in that they locked together, but were a softer plastic and only had one shape and size. You could stack them in a line and that was about it. The teacher was having us use them in order to teach us about patterns.

We were instructed to use different colors of blocks to create a pattern. I was doing this next to a girl named Megan Sutherland. I remember that it was her because, had my teacher not told me a terrible, terrible lie, Megan would have been the focus of my anger, not Miss Petersen.

I was sitting on the floor, taking the plastic blocks out of a bin and constructing my pattern. The pattern went like this:

Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Red. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Red. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green...and so on.

My pattern took considerably longer to develop than all the other ones in the classroom. It also took many, many more yellow blocks than the others. That's the part that was disagreeable to Megan Sutherland. As Miss Petersen walked by, Megan told her, "Miss Petersen, Jon's hoggin' all the yellows."

Miss Petersen, in what (in my experience) was the only wrong thing she ever did to anyone, turned to me and lied:

"Jon, that's not a pattern."

It was a damn pattern. I fought, trying to explain to my teacher how it was a pattern. It didn't really matter; she understood that it was. But she told me it wasn't.

My pattern took more brains (...and more blocks) than those of the other students. It shouldn't have been taken away from me because it was inconvenient. Or even if I had to give up the yellow blocks, I certainly didn't deserve to be lied to.

What if I hadn't fought it? What if I didn't hold on to what I knew to be true? In my mind, that was a truly dangerous moment. It could have been the first step toward developing a very different mind than I have today. For convenience. To avoid ruffling any feathers.

I don't know for sure whether that moment actually triggered anything that ended up affecting my mind long-term for the better. But I have to think that the fact that I so vividly remember it suggests that it was very important.

I very genuinely thank God that I resisted in that moment. The consequences could have been staggering. It was a pattern.