School memory

A friend got me thinking tonight. What school memory do you have? I have so many and they were not just from elementary school either! She can hardly remember anything.

The conversation started after another classmate posted a funny memory about her son and one of his classmates puking on shoes. I said that I remembered someone seemingly always puking during lunchtime! How do I remember those things? I don’t know. I can tell you this – whenever I hear or see something I get thoughts running through my mind and sometimes it’s the old memories that come charging in! Just like that one did. What a school memory that was!

Elementary –

I can remember a Christmas play and we had to build a train out of cardboard and paint it. The lights and the heat during the play are what I remember most. It was a time when we didn’t have that separation of religion and school keeping us from performing some of those beautiful Christmas songs.

Halloween was fun too. We got to dress up when we were younger and would trail through the high school for everyone to see us. Who would have dreamed that someday this would no longer be possible?

Remembering sixth grade – we had a pretty neat teacher. I decided to dress up and act like a television character from The Carol Burnett Show. Oh, how she loved that! I did the gum, the wiggle, and the voice just right – Mrs. Wiggins.

We all loved the end of the school year picnics. Everyone got to have a sack lunch and head to the park in the middle of town and play all day! No homework and we played tag, swung, went on the teeter-totter, and went down the slide! Who remembers the “puk-a-lator”?

Junior High

Who loved gym time? I am talking about when you had to learn to square dance and try climbing the rope to the top of the gym – oh, the trouble that would cause now! You learned to play badminton, played dodgeball, softball, or tennis. The scooter we would sit on and race around on – pinching our fingers constantly! Ouch! And let’s not forget running around the gym just to run around the gym.

The food fights in the cafeteria were pretty crazy! It would start small and then it would get bigger. I don’t recall what happened to us when we got into trouble! Did we have to clean it up? Did we get detention? It was the fun not the trouble we got into that was a school memory.

A time when we were awkward and becoming a teenager. Crushes. Oh boy! Girls were always crushing boys. Boys could have cared less. They weren’t ready to hold hands, go steady, or be a date at the spring and fall dances. I think they just wanted to see who would get the most girls to ask them to dance!

High School

High school dances were typical. You get a great DJ or in our case, a classmate who did a great job, you hoped you had a date for the dance or could ask that special someone to dance, and then you end up dancing with your best friend all by yourselves because either you didn’t have a date or you didn’t care to dance with anyone anyway!

Art Class was a favorite. You could be yourself. The classroom was at the top of the school. It was a favorite place for many of us. The dream of having such a place to be still fills me with hope that someday we could all have that lifestyle of creativity, free-spiritedness, and independence from the typical classroom we associated with for most of our school years.

Homecoming Week was a blast. Our senior class bought t-shirts that had Schmidt Beer logos on them! Unbelievable. Nowadays a student would be sent home, get detention, or even suspended!

Let us not forget science class! If ever there was a time to try to cheat, not pay attention, sleep, or just plain goof off – this was THE class. The teacher’s patience was tried every day. Spitballs hit the chalkboard. Test answers were passed around, and every trick in the book was tried to get out of some of the projects we had to do. I enjoyed the time we got to look at the sky through a telescope.

The picture at the bottom is the new addition to the school. There have been demolition and additions, and many changes inside the school. The school memories I have can never be taken and I hope you can still be that kid inside the school – laughing, creating, being, learning, dreaming.