What can I say about elementary school except that it was a period of innocence, freedom, growth, fun, sadness, first crushes, and the list goes on and on. I have very distinct memories of what it was like to be in school and not knowing the language of English when I first started in 1993 over at Vargas Elementary school. Of course, being in that time my parents raised me to speak Spanish and the only influence I ever had was my friend Adrian, who lived right next door, and my brother and his friend Victor. Hanging around Victor and my brother helped me learn the language of English a bit better but as time went on I still was having trouble with it in school. I remember sitting in Kindergarten and being afraid to say anything and I remember getting into fights with this kid by the name of Stephen. Of course, not knowing any better and being a young kid, I just got into fights with him for whatever reason, he would make fun of me, or we would just fight for no other reason. I was sent home a number of times because of this and that era of my life is marked by being cautious of what I said and how I said it because I felt stupid at times. I also have a memory of playing the telephone game in Kindergarten and not knowing what to say to the next person because I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I was afraid I would mess up what I was saying to them. Of course, in this time this is when kids learn how to share and what not and in this time we had to share toys and what not throughout any possible fighting that kids had between themselves. So, that was sort of a quick period for me because I knew very little about what was going around me and I was gullible to the fact that I had very little, if any, chance of actually succeeding in school. Then comes 1st grade, what I remember most about 1st grade is meeting one of my closest friends Freddy Carillo, who was a little short Salvadorian kid who I could barely begin to understand at first glance. I remember this is when we used to do school presentations and we would do these at night time around 6’o clock or so and the first one I remember is when we worked on a Christmas type thing where we sang as a class Christmas carols around this tree and it was pretty awesome at the time cause this is where I started hearing Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman, and all those other Christmas songs. The most vivid memory I have of first grade is when I ended up pooping my pants and it ended up with me going to the nurse’s office and having to use the bathroom where I had to take off my pants and it wasn’t the prettiest site when I saw what my body had done to these blue jeans of mine. I just remember being afraid because my Uncle’s wife was the one they called and she wasn’t the friendliest person due to the fact that she got upset a lot for no particular reason and she always gave her own kids particular reasons to behave the way they did. Mrs. Sunderland was my teacher that year and I remember being quite fond of her because she understood I had a problem understanding the difference between English and Spanish yet she still tried her best to make sure I got help from the faculty at the school and herself included. I can remember when she had a conversation with me as I cleaning up my cubby and she started telling me how I put in effort with my schoolwork but the results weren’t really showing and she just told me to keep trying harder. That encouraged me even more because she was a great teacher to her 1st grade class as she always seemed to be in a good mood with whatever stupid questions we may have had. In my 2nd year, I had Ms. Barnes who I don’t have much memory of because the year flew by so fast I just remember always playing kick ball on the blacktop with my classmates and I got mad whenever I was on the losing side of things yet I understand now that it was just a game of winners and losers. Third Grade is when I really start remembering these things because my teacher Mrs. Crome treated us like we were one of her best classes and two years later she even stated to a few of us that we were her best class from the three or four years she had been teaching there. I remember my my dad and his friend dropped me off and I met Mrs. Crome after shaking her hand and I felt pleased that a teacher greeted me with such pleasure and kindness. We made Latke’s I remember one year because Hanukkah was coming up and I just remembered how special that was because each of us made our own and we sat around and ate them. I also started to realize at this time that Halloween is one of the best holidays…For kids that is. I dressed up as a Ninja that year and I just thought how cool it would be to throw around ninja stars and yield this very sharp sword that can hurt anybody but looking back at it I was just a kid with a passion just to be me. We also watched Toy Story that day after my teacher tricked us into thinking we were watching The Lion King and looking back on it it wasn’t so bad after all because kids are gullible at that stage so they’ll believe anything. That year I don’t think I learned much besides reading about Bill Clinton, sitting in a circle and doing adlibs which were fun back in the day, watching the Magic School Bus, and also reading Math problems with pluses and minuses which weren’t too difficult. I also remember we had to make up our own stories and mine was about this king who treated his servant like dirt and eventually the king went to throw the servant in jail but yet I never really ended the story but I wish had looking back now. Another momentous occasion is when we had a sleep over at the cafeteria/assembly building which was empty enough to have enough us to sleep there overnight. We had a bunch of activities lined up such as Twister, Duck-Duck Goose, and also hangman. I remember my friend William ended up throwing up near my sleeping bag because he must of have gotten sick from the popcorn that he had that night and I was fine with it because we all have accidents so it comes naturally. Then came 4th grade which was both tremendous and also quite strange because I had no idea I would end up having one of my best teachers in Mr. Hauser. I remember this year he read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, to us and I felt kind of scared when I heard about the Lion, who was referred to as the Asian, being killed in order to save one of the character’s lives. I also remember two field trips we went to, one being to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, and the other one being to this type of ocean place that I don’t remember where it was. The Bay Aquarium was awesome because for one, this is way back when we still had to get people so they could drive us so one of our buddies dads, Charlie Liang, decided he would be one of the drivers and the drive there was funny because all kids talked about back in those days was superheroes and what was on TV so on the way there we just talked about the most random things kids can come up with. I also remember my teacher, Mr. Hauser being very kind when it came to actually seeing how I struggled with certain areas such as English and Math and he encouraged me to try to get my brother or even my parents to help me out which was tough in those days because my mom didn’t know much because she wasn’t that educated and my brother was was barely getting by as well in school. I remember the theme for that year was the plant life and we also ended up going to the wetlands which I have a very vivid memory of because it was cloudy that day and I had no clue that I would end up getting a bit wet that day. This is when we also started doing P.E. and I had a lot of fun always playing Flag Football with the guys because we always tried to be competitive with each other throughout any kind sport. 5th grade was also a bit strange because we had a walkathon that was very memorable for myself and also for many other reasons I had fun this year because this is when I had my first crush on a girl. Her name was Jackie Martin and I remember seeing her and thinking the first thing that attracted to me was her blond hair which made me think that all beautiful girls must have blond hair? I was wrong of course because I would discover women, no matter what they look like, come in different shapes and sizes which isn’t a bad thing by any stretch of the mind. I remember the first few weeks of my 5th grade being quite memorable due to me being first Cafeteria helper, and second this is when I went on a trip to Mexico. The Cafeteria helper thing was fun for two reasons, I got to see what it was like to help out with food and the process that it entails, and I also got to work with Jackie which was a great experience. I just remember asking her what her name was and I was too shy to even ask myself what I was thinking. Either way we got to serve ourselves whatever we wanted including Chicken Nuggets, Corn Dogs, milk, pizza, Tacos, and anything else we wanted. At around the time we had to leave for Mexico my time in the Cafeteria had started and I had to go which left me wondering what would happen to Jackie, I just thought about it until I got back and I discovered my crush was just a natural thought process so I should not have been worrying about it so much. This is also when my teacher, Mrs Caudle, was telling us that she was just our temporary teacher and our real teacher, Mrs. Maddox, was going to come to teach our class and I have mixed feelings about her. She was a nice lady, sometimes but when it came down to it she was strict on everything even being able to talk out of hand which was real annoying at this point. She yelled whenever we got even a little loud and I still think she could have been a little nicer when it came as to how we did our assignments. Overall, I just remember dissecting squid and eating it after in a class we had one day which wasn’t that bad at all =. We also ended up learning about the difference between boys and girls, physically that is. As soon as our instructor that was teaching this I kind of laughed as she mentioned that thing between our legs as did many of the other boys in the class. We also watched this video about how girls get their periods regularly and I just wondered how amazing it was to hear all this. The kid in the video also ended up looking at his brother’s book about reproductive organs and I just laughed when he ended up getting caught, funny then, not so much now. We also went to Science Camp that year which was loads of fun because we learned about the outside world around us and we also got to do a lot of team building activities. What sucked though was that our trip got cut short due to the fact that a lot of people got sick and we had to leave a day earlier than was scheduled. I remember the best part was hiking up some hills to see if we could find snow and we did find snow which was really watery but it ended up being all right after all. Our leader was real cool also because he told us scary stories about ghosts and what not. The walkathon that year was the year that I ended up walking about only 5 miles or so which tired me out but I kind of remember being kind of lonely because my friends got separated from me and I also remember having this coupon for In-N-Out Burger which had just opened in Sunnyvale. They had the truck over there and I remember waiting for my mom so we can grab some burgers after a pretty long afternoon in which I was exhausted from walking so much. Overall, the fun part of elementary school was seeing how much I grew from not knowing so much about the English language to knowing it like the back of my hand and I still to this day pass by Vargas Elementary and I gaze into the hallways to see all the walks I would take to my classes. I also remember this past summer taking Paloma, with my brother and his daughter, Jazmin, and thinking how much fun we had back in those days at Vargas when we would play flag football, soccer, basketball, and all the other sports. The one thing I forgot to mention is this one pretty girl that taught us after school where we needed help with English and her name was Ms. Cannon. Ms. Cannon was pretty awesome even though there were some times I felt she was dealing with idiots sitting there at the table and I remember my buddy Adrian mentioning if he could buy her a naked Indian dude which had me cracking up at the seams. Even though there were times we got on her nerves, I remember she drove up with this Pontiac that was purple and she asked me if I needed help with sentence structure I could meet up with her at 7:45 in the morning because class would start at 8:25. I got there at 7:45 and I just think back and I wonder how teachers can make such a sacrifice without even complaining to others about even once. She ended up helping with the sentence structure part and to this day I think of how much she really didn’t need to show up then but she did anyway for her sake and my sake. I met one of best friends in Vargas which was Freddy, and I can’t stress enough how important he was to how much fun I had in Vargas because we would take walks down to Vargas in the morning and in the afternoon and he would keep me sane sometimes. As I mentioned earlier, Jackie was my first crush but what’s ironic is that I ended up being in a class at De Anza College and I just thought when I saw her how familiar she looked. Once the teacher called her name, I knew it was her because she hadn’t changed so much in the way she looked and she still had that beauty to her. I didn’t have the courage to talk to her yet I kind of laughed about it because I could have sparked a conversation with her but I just said ‘whatever.’ Hope everyone enjoyed this blog, I know I did! Here are some pictures of my class from the various years:
Just Another Day... 