Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Divisionary

Micropipettes! I love using them, but I hate writing about them! And, as it turns out, I have more I need to write about them. Isn't that a shame?

So you wanted something you didn't know about Kelly, and you wanted something juicy. So I wracked my brain to think of something, and the best I could come up with was my transition from private school to public school. I am also really very tired, so we'll see how well this writes out.

After nearly dying by falling into a ditch without so much as a word from the school to my parents about it, it was decided that it was time for me to go to a normal school. Part of the reason was also because the way I was getting my rides to the speech therapist at the local school was really shifty. I have so many fun stories about going to the speech therapist.

Because I live so close to so many naval bases, kids are always coming and going in our school system. So being a new student really wasn't all that odd, and I received zero special attention from the other students because of it. They went right into treating me like their other classmates, and I got no help in figuring out how my second-grade class worked. (You know, because elementary classes all work really weirdly.) Recess was incredibly lonely at first. I met Amber during that first recess, actually. I was walking along the fence, and Amber came and walked along by me. She happened to be new to the class as well, having only just arrived a couple weeks earlier. (She actually didn't really know I was a new student in her class, she just noticed I wasn't in a clique.) I asked her her name, and she replied "A-M-B-E-R." Because of the poor education I had received, or something, I couldn't for the life of me figure out her name. Another girl from the class ran up just then, and called out her name. It was a real life saver.

Amber and I became friends simply because we were the only two girls who weren't bitchy six-year-olds trying to act like they were sixteen. Also, we both loved Beanie Babies.

Transitioning academically was much more difficult. I was years ahead of all the other kids when it came to reading and writing, and I had the ability to think like an individual. I could even write in cursive, while other kids were still practicing their letters. But I was piss poor at mathematics, and I couldn't tell the time on a clock. My teacher felt the best way to correct this was to give me every math assignment I had missed, and have me do them as homework. I did almost none of them, and still do almost none of my math homework. While other kids in the class were beginning to grasp multiplication, I was just starting to understand addition. It stayed that way for the rest of the schoolyear. I even developed a technique of counting on my fingers that didn't involve sitcking them into the air, so other kids wouldn't notice how bad I sucked.

I guess I grew out of my mathematical slump, because I would spend the rest of my years (until last year) in the toughest math classes offered to my grade. There was once where I even asked to be put in a more difficult math class.

Socially, I waxed and waned. I remember, at one point early in the transition, my popularity suddenly bloomed. There were girls on either side of me, tugging my arms in opposite directions so that I would play with them, and not the other girls. I had no idea who any of them were, but they knew me really well. Kids on the bus greeted me, and I was supremely embarrassed that I couldn't even say their names. I had always wondered if I had done something that was really cool, but never realized it.

I promptly went ahead and made a lot of enemies with these girls (they were the horrible sorts of people, anyways) and made friends with the social rejects. They really weren't all that strange, they were just like me in the fact that they saw that the other girls were really dumb. We formed a club, which was broken up by the recess teacher, and I'm still fairly close with all of those girls.

I like talking about my elementary school days. They were kinda strange... Maybe I'll talk about them more, later.

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