The Red Balloon, etc.

My kindergarten teacher played this movie for us just before summer vacation at West Kearns Elementary in June 1988. I was six years old. Today I taught Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Creative Writing to girls 13-17 years old. Some of them still suck their thumbs when they are at the group home reading David Sedaris and they think no one is looking. One of them has to carry a ratty, torn blanket covered with Disney princesses to symbolize her depression. Today I let them run around outside and write haiku underneath the volleyball net and on the grass in front of the horse pastures. She wrote hers from a swing, inspiring girls around her to write about the oscillating rhythm under a fish-eye blue sky, the blanket dragging in the dirt beneath her.

Half the girls announced to me that they hate school, hate pencils, hate readingwritingrythmatic, hate thinking and learning and doing, and ohbytheway, I have ADD/ADHD which pretty much makes me moot to anything you ever have planned, so don't take it personal, k? (They are also my best poets so far. Quirky, but good. They don't have enough vocabulary to hide behind fancy crap yet.)

The other half claim they have yet to be challenged in school. They've been reading Shakespeare since they were five and they are bored of teachers who grade merely on participation and completion of assignments. They are too brilliant to be normal and all of their wounds come from being too aware, too awake, too advanced. Their hands are constantly raised and I both love and fear them. They are who I was when I was 14. Lost, dazed and confused (sans marijuana), but oh-so-brilliant. I knew it all. Calculus=cake. AP English was a breeze. I yawned dramatically for teachers I felt were babying us. I could spell any word in the dictionary and hated spellcheck for stealing my thunder. I learned to read when I was four and got sent out of class in elementary school to read with the older kids. I figured I'd be an astronaut someday, or a writer.

And here I am now, dumber than ever, with a year of desert brainrot that has affected even the most simplistic grammatical equations. One girl circled a typo in my horrible getting-to-know-you sheet (something I promised myself I'd never make a class do), and I suddenly feared I'd become just like all the other English teachers I knew were faking it and probably preferred television over reading, too.

I am 26 years old. Just over a quarter of a century. My kindergarten teacher is likely in a nursing home and I don't even remember her name. But I remember her face, and I remember the Humpty Dumpty dot-to-dot we did on the first day. I lost it on the bus because I didn't have a backpack. So there you go. First and last day of kindergarten remembered.