Wednesday, 26 May 2004 | Safe/danger

I'm a little hazy, but I think it happened during second grade, the year I had a teacher who hated me. I had the opposite reaction from most of my teachers, presumably because I was quiet and shy and got good grades. Although I was always inclined to be a little rebellious, I didn't do very much rebelling, in part because I was so afraid of getting caught.

For my second and third grade years, through some redistricting miracle, I stayed at the same school I'd attended the year before, while ALL of the other students and teachers and even the principal transferred to another school. I was pretty miserable, since my friends had disappeared, and since, even at seven, I recognized that the instruction had been abruptly dumbed down. I eventually made a few close friends, but felt that my other friendships had been unfairly paused.

Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I lived in my head a lot in second grade and kept whatever negative feelings I had to myself, or so I thought. Ms. Worley, the teacher who hated me, didn't agree. According to her, I rolled my eyes whenever she said something I didn't like, which apparently happened rather often.

She wasn't a very nice woman. She was tall and thin and her shoulders folded in like the wings of a paper airplane, and she had a head of tiny and wild ashe-blond curls that sprang up out of her scalp like a Jack-in-the-box army. Her nose was hooked and I'm pretty sure she had a wart or two, but that could possibly be an invention of my childhood brain.

Propped against the blackboard in her classroom was an actual barometer of her mood, which she'd cut out of yellow construction paper. Her mood was shaped like a half circle, and it had two flavors: "safe" and "danger." A black mobile pointer was fastened to the cardboard, which she would move back and forth to externalize her oscillating temperament. When the pointer crossed the line into "danger," it meant that the class had to go outside and run laps around the playground until she cooled down.

Sometimes it was me, rolling my eyes, which nudged the pointer into the "danger" zone. I know, because she would announce to the class that it was my fault. (Which very likely made me roll my eyes AGAIN, which of course started a vicious cycle. Most of the time I didn't even realize I was doing it. Perhaps I should be thankful that I'm not still running around that playground at this very moment.)

Anyway, I think that was the year that my dad taught me an incredibly sweet but terrible lesson. On the dreaded morning my science project was due, my dad woke me up unusually early, just as the darkness was beginning to dissolve. Together, we walked out to the vegetable garden in the back yard, collected mounds of wormy dirt, and proceeded to stand in the carport and sleepily build a volcano, using baking soda (?) red dye (?) and some other important and secret scientific ingredients. Somehow, even though I'd waited until the last minute and even though I was absolutely terrible at making science projects, my volcano won first prize at the science fair.

I never again won any science-related awards, but I did learn that waiting until the last minute is indeed very rewarding. I'm also reminded that my dad has always been helpful and kind, and it's not just a recent thing.