Learning

One sunny spring morning when I was five, I woke and wandered from the bedroom compartment in the very back of the caravan home through the living room into the kitchen on the other end, ready for breakfast, when Mutti announced, “You’re going to school today.”

She made me take off yesterday’s dress, and pulled a clean, but rumpled one over my head, attacked my short brown hair with a brush and put a bobby pin into my bangs.

School? How nice! I thought while eating a fresh bun Mutti had bought at the baker’s earlier that morning. Going to school meant I’d be big, like my sister Carmen.

Carmen and I hurried after Mutti across the town commons, to the elementary school of the town we were holding our carnival in that week.

In the school hallway, she asked where the third and first grade classes were. They were both in the same classroom. She marched us into the room and gave the teacher the two little booklets that would record our school attendance for the weeks we were traveling.

Mutti left. The teacher stared at us. He asked Carmen for her name and what grade she was in, and asked one of the little boys to move over to make room for her.

He turned to me. “You look a little small,” he said. “I’m almost six,” I answered.

“Have you gone to school before?”

I shook my head.

"Well, it doesn't matter." He led me to an empty seat on the other side of the room.

He drew some numbers and signs onto the left side of the big board in front of the room and told the older children to copy them and solve the problems. 

One my side of the room, he had the smaller children take out their slate boards and the styluses that went with it. 

He made a squiggly mark onto the other side of the board. "That's called an S. You first graders will practice your S's on your slate board today."

           When he noticed I didn’t have one, he gave me a slate board and said I could keep it. I focused 

hard and did a pretty good job writing S’s onto the slate board. Later the teacher handed out papers and

pencils and had us trace the S’s onto lined paper. I made three rows full.

At the end of class I could hardly wait to get home and show Mutti what I had learned. I know how to draw S’s, and how to pronounce them. The teacher had told me that my name began with just that letter, the S.

I ran home over the commons. “Mutti, Mutti, I know how to make an “S,” I said. “Look here, I made three rows full.”

My baby brother Franz yelled and chased little Josefa, who was too small to go to school. She was crying and saying, “He’s pulling my hair. Make him stop.”

Mutti, with a spoon in her hand, grabbed Franz as he ran by and shook him.

She turned to me. “Shut up and get ready for lunch,” she said, not even noticing the paper in my hand.