I was chatting with a friend the other day and all of a sudden, a couple of memories of a single year in school came back to me. It was the year I was in grade 3.

The first memory to come to mind was of discipline gone wrong. I remember my teacher in the middle of a lesson, and I remember somebody was disruptive. This teacher could do the disciplinarian if she had to, but that wasn’t the whole story. In this case, she figured that an effective way to get this student’s attention would be to whack her wooden pointer on the student’s desk. It certainly got everybody’s attention. There’s something about the end of the pointer breaking off and flying across the room which tends to do that! The whole class (the teacher included) had a good long laugh at that!

Of course, it wasn’t all fun like that. I live in Canada, so our spelling tends to be a mix of the British and American systems (we talk about colours instead of colors, but we talk about tires instead of tyres). And the speller we used in that grade had a lovely bit to trip up a poor student. Because in two successive lists of words we learned two different spellings of that colour which is in between black and white. I can’t remember which spelling is which or the order in which we learned them, but if the first week we learned grey, the second week we learned gray. (It was that or vice versa.) And the second week, I spelled it “the wrong way” (at least, the wrong way for that week). Even as a ten-year-old I thought the point of spelling was to teach me words, not to teach me to regurgitate information. But try as I might to argue the point, my teacher wouldn’t budge.

I think there was an earlier incident which may have factored in. I probably have to admit to being a bit of a know-it-all at the time. And so, despite what we’d been taught in class, because I knew better, when we were asked to name the planets in the order of their distance from the sun, I listed Pluto (which was then a planet) before Neptune. I did successfully argue that point, bringing in the book with the appropriate evidence from home (that being that, because of the shape of Pluto’s orbit it would be nearer to the sun than Neptune until 1999).

And a little bit of the humanity of teachers came through, because my grade 3 teacher was also the first teacher whose first name I learned, because her key chain had Sue written on it.