Thursday, April 17, 2014

Orange - a short mischievous rambling on third grade


No stuff. Just story.
Logan's favorite color for a while was orange.
That reminded me of another little boy who liked orange.
Like everyone else in my first grade class, Peter Hendrickson was issued a box of 8 fat crayons.
He wanted to trade his blue crayon for my orange one.
We didn't trade, but he did manage to negotiate with other kids, and wound up with a majority of his crayons being orange.

Peter was also in my third grade class.  I think I would be embellishing history to claim that he had a favorite orange sweater that year. The sweater I remember could well have been in first grade.

In third grade there was a box in the front of the room where we put book reports. These were not really reports, but rather purple ditto forms that could be completed in five minutes - Title, Author, Main idea.
I don't know if the contest was official, but Peter and I were definitely competing to be the one who had read the most books.  As far as I am concerned, he cheated in a major way by getting chicken pox so that he could stay home and read for days and days.  Ricky McHugh might have been a contender, too, but he only read the skinniest books he could find, so, while annoying, he was hard to take seriously.

Our third grade teacher was Miss Coffin, and I suspect that she was new.  This was long before No Child Left Behind, so there was much more flexibility in the curriculum.
Miss Coffin was taking flying lessons, so her class learned to spell "fuselage" and "aileron" and to label the parts of an airplane on a line drawing.

Also, Miss Coffin mispronounced "mischievous".  She said  mis-CHE-vi-ous.
I have since learned that there has been much discussion of this word, and that she was clearly not the only one who used that pronunciation.  However, I was told at home that this was absolutely not right, and, indeed, on the subject of the extra syllable,  "evidence for the spelling goes back to the 16th century. Our pronunciation files contain modern attestations ranging from dialect speakers to Herbert Hoover. But both the pronunciation and the spelling are still considered nonstandard." (merriam-webster site)

NOTE TO SIBLINGS:  Not nearly as good a tale as "Afaghanstan", I know,but it's all I've got.

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