Something that I missed

Every more often I get reminiscence of my grade school years and it somehow gave me back the childhood joy, simple and fun.

My elementary years were superb. I got a taste of my first hand fight when I was on the third grade. If I could still remember it clearly, it was over a preferred seat in the classroom. We were waiting for the room to open when I picked the fight with Marinette. That was the first and only fist fight I had been into. I know she couldn’t forget it either but am sure she had forgiven me. We are still best friends.

In my first grade I used to sit in front of the class but was transferred by my teacher at the back, seated with a boy to prevent me from talking too much, but that just got my teacher frustrated. I was still the most talkative in the class. Funny memories from grade one includes the great escape of Kate when I jumped out of the window during an annual immunization. I couldn’t imagine the nightmare of my teacher then.

My grandmother was my very own teacher in my second grade but that doesn’t exempt me from being disciplined under her very strict administration. I got my share of pinches in the ear and had knelt with arms stretch when we were told to gather stones for our rock garden. What happened? Of course, the “bida” went with her classmates to a distant beach to gather stones which took us over two hours to go back to class.

Fourth grade was a bit uninteresting. Maybe I started to grow up then. Instead of spending my time running in our school yard, I spent it more often collecting movie snips from newspapers to be rivaled with the best collection from my classmates. It was also the year when I just preferred playing marbles under our building that at one time I got my mom worried a great deal when at six o’clock I still wasn’t home for dinner. Of course the consequence was too much too bear. Maybe on that year I got withdrawn. I also escaped from a school program when I was tasked to recite a poem and just feigned sickness.

Life started to perk up again during the fifth and sixth grade. The fifth grade was full of horror stories because I had a classmate who seemed to have a third eye and was seeing things beyond a 10-year old imagination. It was also on that year that most of the girls in class experienced sexual harassment from a male school teacher. But I guess he didn’t have succeeded that far when his bad intentions raised controversy among the girls in our class and we all totally avoided him. How scary it could have been. Yaiks! Manyakis!

Grade six started as a frustrating year. Some of my classmates really wanted to be in Section A. However, middle of July a few of us were transferred to Section B. It was still homogenous then and it really mattered what section you were in. We cried then. But we could not blame our teacher for transferring us. They transferred us not because we were inferior. It was actually a consequence of what we did the previous grade and that was specifically choosing to enroll in Section B. We had our major reason then and they couldn’t condemn us also. The teacher in Section A for the fifth grade was really a well-known terrorist. She throws erasers and books to her pupils and it was what scared us the most. Well, it turned out that grade six wasn’t bad at all. And I proved it that it didn’t really matter what section you were in just to get the valedictory post.

There were also plenty of mishaps throughout my elementary life. At one time I was splattered with carabao droppings while playing under a mango tree. A classmate threw a huge centipede at me which really gave me the phobia since then. The most terrible was being pulled off my gartered skirt in front of my classmates.

But oh, childhood! Your memories are just soooo sweet and charming. I love the coco-leaf-swing which made me feel like flying in the air. Many times my back hit the trunk of the tree, or my body rolled down the hill when the leaves snapped but it was sooo much fun that I would do it again if I have the opportunity. I loved the rice cakes and I missed them. I simply adore the fun carefree feeling running in the fields chasing dragonflies and grasshoppers and getting soaked in the rain.

How I wish my Josh will get to experience the nicest feeling of growing up in the province where life is just so naïve and pure.