Tarkblog

I was recanting some old memories on the drive to work this morning.

I went to Ouabache Elementary School. It’s pronounced “Wabash”, but of course, most people who have never seen it before call it “Oh-Baw-Chee”. It’s Native American, so our mascot was, of course, the Indian.

Anyway, Ouabache wasn’t the school I should have gone to, because most kids go to the school in their “district”. I didn’t really live that close to Ouabache, and should have instead gone to Rio Grande, another Native American named school. I guess a little before my first day of Kindergarten my mom went to Rio Grande, as it was brand new, and they had an orientation for new parents. They built the school based around some kind of new concept called “open learning”. There were no walls between the classrooms, it was just a big open learning environment. The idea behind this, I believe, was to foster better learning for the students. My mom disagreed, and thought it was going to be a complete mess. I ended up at Ouabache, which was also in the district and within walking distance of the lady who would babysit me before and after school.

There was nothing particularly exciting about Ouabache, except for the following events which stand out in my mind:

In the morning, they would open the main doors at around 7 for students to come in and sit in the cafeteria. My mom had to be at work at 7, so some morning when the babysitter couldn’t watch me, she’d drop me off directly at school at around 6:45 or so. And I, all 5 years old of me, would hang out in front of the school for those 15 minutes.

On mornings we walked, we would, of course, try to get to school as close to 8:10 as possible, without going over. The classrooms for the K-3 grades were at the opposite end of the school as the cafeteria, so we typically would go in a different entrance. However, they wouldn’t unlock that entrance until 8:00 sharp, which meant if we happened to get there early we’d either have to hang out by the door, or walk the extra distance to the main door. I understand that they do this so that students aren’t randomly walking around the building without supervision, but in today’s world it seems rather funny that they would be okay letting us hang around outside without that same supervision.

Since I wasn’t in the school district for Ouabache, I couldn’t ride a bus, so my mom had to drop me off and pick me up every day from the day care. For kindergarten, I went to her friend’s house as she had a daughter who was 1 year older than me, but after that I had to go to “Magic Years” day care.

When 5th grade came around, I was put into the AT (academically talented) class. This was the only AT class on the north part of Terre Haute, so it also drew in students who had gone to other area elementary schools. And, because of this, bus transportation was provided. I would take the bus to Otter Creek Elementary school, then switch and get on another one that would take me to Ouabache. I was the first one on the bus in the morning, and the last at night. While my mom was happy that I now had public transportation, she was livid that she couldn’t use it previously.

I visited the principal’s office 4 times while I was a student there. They all happened in 5th/6th grade. The first time was for an incident on the school bus where a girl forgot her lunch box on the bus, and as we were pulling away someone (I don’t remember it if was me or not) threw it out the window at her, and it konked her in the head.

The second visit was also for a bus related incident. We had a “clay” lesson at school earlier inthe week, and we were taking our pottery home with us that day. Mine was a “peace” sign. For fun, I had three different people grab each part of the sign and pull, to see it rip apart. It did rip apart. It also ripped open the arm of a girl sitting near by as the momentum of everyone pulling was pretty high once it came apart. She was in the hospital for a few days, and afterwards I learned that she was in gymnastics and was never able to do gymnastics again. Oh well.

Incident #3 also related to the bus. The day before Christmas vacation in 6th grade, when we went to go get on the bus it was already gone. This is because the 5th graders told her nobody was coming from the 6th grade class (as a prank, I assume). So, we had to go to the principals office to “testify” about what happened and how we ended up missing the bus.

And the last incident happened when, during an indoor recess and a substitute teacher who wandered off, a bunch of us went on the stage to play around. Someone grabbed one of the mics and started signing - apparently, they turned it on too, as the cafeteria workers didn’t find our karaoke broadcast during lunchtime very funny.

With all of these principal vists, I should have gotten in trouble. But I never did. My parents never found out any of them (save for the time the bus left us). I’m pretty positive other kids’ parents got calls on some of these events, too. No, I didn’t get in trouble because my grandpa was also a principal (at Deming Elementary), and he was really good friends with the principal at Wabash. Instead, I just got the “I wouldn’t want to have to tell your grandfather about your indescretions” talk. But, I always came away without an elementary school criminal record.

I remember one thing I did that I never got caught at. In the 6th grade, we did projects about the solar system. One of the things I wanted to do was come up with a way to show the vast distances, so I was working on figuring out if the earth was a certain size (like, a golf ball), how far away things would be. I used the hallway as a starting point, as it was a long corridor. And I made measurements with a yardstick, and put down tape to mark the locations. However, the next day one of the janitors removed the tape. So, pissed off, I went back and did it again, only thing time I used a big black magic marker and made my marks on the carpet. I don’t know if people just didn’t notice, or what, but I noticed them whenever I walked down that hallway.

Ahh, the memories.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 at 11:58 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.