30-year old memories

I'm teaching third grade right now, and there are moments when it takes me back to my own third grade experience. For whatever reason, I have a vivid memory of being the fastest find-a-word puzzle solver. Mrs. Samuels encouraged us to do them as fast as we could, and I won A LOT. And I liked being the fastest. So much so that when someone else beat me, I recall being a bit miffed. How dare someone circle words faster than me.

I also remember being obsessed with the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series of books. I'm sure I read every one our library had on hand. There was just something about the transformations those bratty kids would go through in her books that fascinated me. Reading was a big deal to me in third grade - mostly because I think that's the grade when kids start reading chapter books and realizing they can get lost in a story. I want to say I read "The Diary of Anne Frank" that year, but that seems a little young. But I'm pretty sure I read "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," and was so into it that I remember taking it to the lake over the weekend and staying in the camper reading.

And then there were those lunch tickets. Today it's all electronic, but back then we were given certain color tickets according to how much our parents paid in advance. My mother usually bought us monthly tickets, the blue ones, and not many kids had those. Most had the smaller pink ones that were just a week's worth of lunches. But those blue ones - your parents had to write an $11 check out for those. That was BIG TIME money. And I had the responsibility of safely getting it from my pocket to the office without losing it. The cafeteria lady would hole punch the ticket each day, and the ticket would eventually become wrinkled and torn and who knows how it stayed in one piece until the end of the month. If we didn't have a lunch ticket, we'd take our 55 cents to school in one of those weird rubbery money holders. They were shaped like a little deflated football with a slit down the middle. You squeezed the sides to make it open so you could get your money in and out.

And now I'm so old that I've substituted at that same school, Rusk Elementary. I could actually be an employed teacher there in the near future, who knows. What a 360 that would be.