Do you remember being in elementary school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My worst memory from elementary school is being punished for no reason…

There was a girl in my class (and rode my bus also) who had a minor facial deformity. One day I beat her at a game on the bus and she got really mad. To get back at me, the next day she told the teacher and counselor that I had picked on her about her facial deformity. Crocodile tears and everything. Total lie. I got punished both at school and then at home- of course, no one believed me! I hated her for years after, Lol.

Whoa that is wild. What an introduction to the world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just reflecting on some of the posts in here about roasting, bullies etc and it's making me reflect back on my elementary school days and all the shenanigans I got up to.

I used to walk up to boys, punch them on the arm and run away as fast as I could. Those horrible "How can you tell if someone is Ethiopian" jokes were popular and kids were repeating those constantly. I started sneaking cigarettes in 5th grade!

Of course we were told not to do these things, but I feel like the powers that be understood that we weren't terrible kids... that we were learning how to be in the world and testing our boundaries.

What are your memories of elementary school? What were some "bad" things that your friends / class got up to?

I just remember it being normal, free and fun. I don’t recall anything specific that makes me recollect it that way, but the last year or two was different. I started developing some issues when a few things changed in my life. Lying, bad attitude, bullying, back answering teachers, soiling and few other things. It seemed like I was in trouble for something just about every week.

[Anonymous]

How many remember when they had a bathroom accident in elementary school? It happens at least once with most kids.

[Anonymous]

Never had a bathroom accident.
I’m even older than dirt.
Had a boy walk over to me during jumping jacks in PE and just punch me in the gut. I’m a girl. After that my mom told me if a boy tries to hurt you, kick him between the legs.
Had that opportunity when one tripped me running around third base. Got up, dusted myself off and kicked him where it counted. Best feeling ever.

[Anonymous]

yes I have some memories

[Anonymous]

I played soccer with mainly boys on the back field at recess. It would often switch to “smear the queer” where one person would hold the ball and everyone else would try to tackle and get the ball from that person. I hated the game and would always leave. At the time, I did understand the name of the game, I just didn’t like it. I don’t think the teachers ever stopped them from playing or calling it that.

It was usually one boy and me who climbed to the top of the rope in gym class. I remember doing well at the Presidential Fitness activities and being mad when a girl I beat in those activities won “most athletic girl.” She didn’t even make it to the top of the rope!

There was a big reading charts where we got a stamp for every book read. I had a big competition with the boy who sat in front of me. I loved the famous people biographies that focused on when the person was young. 3/4 of the book was their first 20 years and the last part would be, then he was president and led the country during the civil war, etc.

[Anonymous]

I don’t remember

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I remember pushing a girls from my class on the swings so that she would give me a picture of Johnny Depp from Teen Beat.

Voting for Dukakis in our class mock election and being the only one.

I guess you weren’t in Massachusetts.

[Anonymous]

I remember “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!”

So bad!

[Anonymous]

- stepping in orange dog poop on a class field trip (3rd grade)
- lunch monitor (6th grader) threatening to chop fingers off with a paper cutter when I was in K
- playing heads up seven up

[Anonymous]

Elementary school? I remember daycare and I have pictures to prove that the clothes, toys, and people I remember, did exist.
I even remembered that we had a camera crew from national tv come by. I found the 5 second clip in tv archives. Other 20 kids had no idea what I was talking about.

[Anonymous]

I remember a lot from elementary school. I also remember some things from the nursery program I did at a local church . . . a few songs, dances, and games; milk, graham crackers, and canned fruit cup for snack time; not wanting to nap at nap time. I also think they had bunked cribs that they'd put us in . . . almost like cages . . . but that's not a dependable memory.

[Anonymous]

I grew up in an abusive household so I don't have all that many memories of grade school. Mostly snippets of me being by myself, doing something mundane, like a four-second memory to doing the monkey bars or eating hot lunch mashed potatoes. CPTSD does that to a person. It steals your memories. But maybe that isn't a bad thing in some cases.

[Anonymous]

I remember most things.

I remember some things I’m really ashamed of — a friend when we were 6 told me that she got a D on her report card and I told me my grandmother said that D stood for dunce. She was so sweet and I realized almost immediately it was a mean thing to say. I think in her case maybe D stood for dyslexia but back then they didn’t diagnose kids — just passed them along until they sort of gave up, mostly.

I remember a kid teasing me because he thought my last name was Irish (I swear this was in the 1980s, not the 1880s) and I told him it wasn’t even Irish, it was German, so he started calling me a nazi. I feel like that wouldn’t be okay now!

I remember another kid getting hit by a rock in his head at the bus stop and it made a hole in his skull and he had to wear a helmet for years. I shared that story on this site a while ago when a kid got hurt by a girl throwing a rock or piece of metal and some people suggested the girl was a sociopath or something. In the 80s, the kid would obviously get punished but no one would think they were a sociopath — kids just did that stuff. I knew another kid that did something similar and he’s a well respected lawyer now.

I remember all the playground equipment like the bars we hung upside down by our knees. The best was the spinning thing — we had a youngish male PE teacher and we would all chant his name until he would do a power push to get that thing REALlY spinning! He was very popular with the kids — the kind of PE teacher that made things fun and never made even the wimpy kids like me feel bad.

I remember almost all my ES teachers, good and bad. In retrospect I really only had one bad teacher in ES. She used to yell at us all the time, and make me grade the papers, and I once heard her telling a girl that if she failed another math test she’d have to repeat 4th grade. The girl did fail the next math test and was sobbing about having to repeat the grade. The teacher then denied ever having said that and when th girl said I had heard it, the teacher basically forced me to deny it. I felt awful about it and still remember that feeling I later got teamed up with that girl for a project and realized she was basically illiterate. In retrospect, I’m sure she had significantly learning disabilities but no one had gotten her th help she needed. She was very bubbly and popular and I always thought she looked down on me until we had to do that project, and then I just felt bad for her. That same teacher was the only one that ever gave me detention — for rolling my eyes once when she was on one of her rants yelling at us.

I also remember playing Star Wars with the boys (advantage of being the only girl geek was that I could always be Leia!), and also trying to play baseball with the boys at recess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in an abusive household so I don't have all that many memories of grade school. Mostly snippets of me being by myself, doing something mundane, like a four-second memory to doing the monkey bars or eating hot lunch mashed potatoes. CPTSD does that to a person. It steals your memories. But maybe that isn't a bad thing in some cases.

My husband has almost no memories of his childhood. He’s never been willing to talk about it but he and his brother both say their mother was emotionally abusive. I find it really odd. He also doesn’t seem to retain memories of our life together — he often forgets places we’ve been and things like that. He has a much better memory for things he learned in school though.