5 & 10

Day 41

As if glasses weren't enough, now I've got braces!!

I feel like Jan Brady!!

It’s another look back to my school days, and I’m up to the fifth grade (1984-1985). While not as memorable or fantastic as the fourth grade (this year my teacher was a guy, ‘nuff said!), it was still a great school year. I got braces on my teeth this year, but the good news was that this year I was 10...the big 1-0, which made me feel almost like I was an adult! I mean, I was in the double digits now! Look out world!

Anyway, as I just mentioned, I had a male teacher in fifth grade, named Mr. Cornish. He was very tall--almost intimidating to me--but he was also very friendly and helpful. And he was a force to be reckoned with! I remember that I was very talkative this year and he had to “remind” me to be silent on many occasions.

This year I'm right next to the principal, Mr. Milne.

The reason I was very talkative in class was because my two best friends were in the same class as me, named Ben and Bryan - they just happened to be twins! We hung out a lot, playing with our G.I. Joe action figures at my house (G.I. Joe was my thing this year!), having a sleepover once in awhile, jumping on the trampoline in my backyard. Great times!

As with the 4th grade I had an opportunity to enter the school’s National PTA Reflections Project; this year I entered in the Art, Literature division. It was a drawing and a mini-story, as I recall, but I don’t remember much else about it. No matter, as I didn’t earn a ribbon, although I did get a certificate for my participation.

Other remembrances from the 5th grade: Mr. Cornish read to the class The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Great books! Our class got to make video presentations (mine was on using the library and it…sucked big time! A major yawn-fest); but one student had break dancing in their video(!) to the Chaka Khan hit “I Feel For You” (a favorite song of mine!) Well, c’mon it was the eighties after all!

My favorite part of the 5th grade was the end of the year awards assembly, where I was awarded a Certificate of Scholarship for…Creative Writing. I remember being totally surprised about this, being recognized for my writing. I did not expect it. But earlier that year our class studied the pioneers and we had to write journals, using our imagination and creating pioneers and their backgrounds. I had a lot of fun with that; to add some authenticity to the journal entries I wrote I crumbled up the paper, smoothed it out, then repeated the process until the pages were so wrinkled and worn down that they seemed like ancient parchment rather than notebook pages.

My graduation from 5th grade to 6th grade.

My love of creative writing seems to have been inflamed since the 5th grade, because since then I have always been dreaming up ideas for short stories and novels, creating and developing characters, jotting down ideas and plot lines, making several attempts at writing a book, secretly hoping to write “The Great American Novel”, writing in a daily journal, writing a blog! Now that I think about it the 5th Grade was the starting point, the push for me to want to become a writer! I guess the 5th grade was pretty fantastic after all!