Fifth grade was a big year for me. I was an extremely shy child. Kindergarten went okay, but by first grade and second grade, I was so stressed out by the social scene, that I regularly threw up in order to avoid school. Fortunately I was smart enough to keep up academically, but I was an emotional basket-case when it came to fitting into the group of kids at school.
In third grade an awesome teacher helped me come out of my shell by allowing me to spend most recesses talking to her during playground duty. She was probably bored to death, but that understanding ear made all the difference. In fourth grade, my leadership skills started to slowly emerge thanks to the help of another teacher. By fifth grade, the crippling effects of shyness were in the past and I had become part of the group.
But fifth grade brought more challenges. Now I was part of the group, but each individual member was growing and exerting their experience and ideas on where we all should be going. Sometimes that lead us to being kind to one another and others outside the group. Sometimes it didn't.
The fifth grade teachers swapped students for different subjects to level the classes. My homeroom teacher, LaPrele Robins, was a gracious, warm woman who loved math and reading cook books. She was a grandma who grew geraniums in the classroom and loved all her students. She taught me everything except reading. Ms. (the first Ms. I ever had) Harrison was single. She loved literature and probably loved teaching, but she mostly scared me to death.
We read The Lemming Condition, Rabbit Hill, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Bridge to Terabithia independently as part of our reading curriculum. Then we were required to create a project to express our experience with the book. I hated those projects. Even now I'd rather write or talk about my feelings, but glue, glitter, paint, or paper mache was the requirement.
Despite the fact that I was basically petrified to be in her class for that hour every day, Ms. Harrison assigned books that I loved reading. Still this second time through Bridge to Terabithia shows me that I really didn't get a very deep understanding of the themes of those books. I reread The Lemming Condition in the last couple years too. I think she was making a statement about the condition of fifth - ninth grade girls in general with Lemming and Bridge, but I totally missed that the first time around.
Bridge is about a boy named Jesse who doesn't fit into his family and doesn't really feel important or cared for at school. Leslie, a girl, moves in down the road. Jesse's plan for the year was to be The Fastest Fifth Grade Runner. Leslie runs faster. Jesse finds himself back down in the unrecognized masses, but then Leslie, who has been trying to reach out to him as a friend, finally makes it through his defenses. Together they create a world and begin find a place to belong. There is more to the story, but you should read it and experience it yourself if you haven't already.
Pre and middle teens, girls especially, are brutally unkind to each other. They are trying to find themselves and define their place in space. The way they often do that is by crushing someone else and taking their space. That all is dealt with in this book.
I had those same experiences in fifth and sixth and seventh grade. And again in tenth. It was hard. I learned somewhere along in there that I have infinite worth regardless of what the group thinks, says, or does. They may not be listening to or following me, but that doesn't make my ideas or direction wrong. And their direction isn't necessarily wrong for them either. But it can be really hard if you know that you aren't suppose to be following them. And worse if they bar you from following them. Rejection stinks.
No comments:
Post a Comment