The teacher I said I'd never forget

I just found my yearbook. As far as I can tell it is the only one I ever owned, a single thin book from first grade at Marvin Elementary, 1994 to 1995. There are no autographs in it, not one, even though signing each other’s yearbooks was absolutely a thing back then. So it is just the pages, clean, waiting for signatures that never came.

Well, clean is not quite right. Because at some point six-year-old me got hold of this book and went through the whole thing crossing out every single person I did not personally know. Page after page of fifth graders I had never met, each face with a careful line drawn through it. I have no memory of doing this. But I clearly did it, with real commitment, and finding it now is one of the funniest things I have ever seen myself do.

My own inscription

The front of the book has a little fill-in page, and here is what I wrote, more or less exactly.

Hi, this is my yearbook. Here is a picture of me. (There is no picture attached.) If you want to see another picture of me, turn to page 18. My name is Todd. I am in the first grade. My teacher’s name is Miss Hogbin. We are in room 107, which I arrived at by writing 108, scribbling it out, writing 107, scribbling that out, and then writing 107 again. My best friend is Pat. We play kickball. I’m really good at, and then I wrote XXXX NO. But I’m not so good at, and I wrote XXX NO. This has been a pretty good year. One thing I’ll never forget is my teacher.

That last line is the truest thing in the whole book, so let me talk about her.

Mrs. Hogbin

My first grade teacher was Mrs. Hogbin. To me she was a tallish lady with very classic mom hair, round glasses, and slightly squinty eyes that disappeared completely behind the biggest smile you ever saw.

Her classroom was right next to the front door of the school, and whether it was on purpose or just luck of the floor plan, she made a habit of standing in the entryway in the morning and greeting kids as they came in. And here is the thing I remember most clearly out of the whole year: every single one of her students, past or present, would walk up and get a hug from her on the way in. I was not special. Everyone got the hug. But walking through that door, cold and sleepy, and seeing her smiling face waiting there, and getting to give her the biggest hug, was genuinely one of my favorite things about being a kid. I was at that school for kindergarten through third grade, but I only really knew her starting in first grade, and I am glad I got those years of the door hug.

Touch points

She taught me a system called touch points. The idea is that each number has a set of dots hidden inside it. One has one dot, two has a dot at each end, three has three, and so on, and if you can picture the dots you can just count them up in your head to add and subtract. See an eight and an eight, picture four dots on each (then remember to double it, because it is an eight), and away you go.

For a long stretch of my life I almost resented learning it, because it worked so well that I never bothered to truly memorize my math facts. I just leaned on the dots. And then multiplication arrived and the dots scaled up into these impossible swarming clouds you could not track. But for plain addition and subtraction? Touch points were the bomb, and honestly I still use them today, in a quiet way, in my head.

This was also the year of the anti-drug program, the one with the dog. First it was a real dog, then somewhere along the way the dog became a puppet, and a police officer would come in and talk to us about never doing drugs. I do not remember the dog’s name, but I remember the bit.

The class

I remember a lot of these kids fondly, and I have a cheat sheet now, because the yearbook is sitting right here.

There was a boy named Jason I always wondered about over the years. We were friends, briefly, in that easy first grade way, and I had this feeling there was a friendship there that just never got the chance to grow before life moved everybody around. A while back I actually managed to look him up, and I was happy to find he is doing well, working in a trade. He almost certainly does not remember me. That is okay. I remembered him.

There was a boy named Adam who was my great rival in gym class. I loved to run, more than that, I wanted to be the single fastest kid in the grade, and he was my competition. The funny part is that after I moved away to Wentzville, he turned up in my new district too, and we ended up graduating high school together years later. We were never close, more like lifelong acquaintances who started on the same elementary school track, but I always liked that our paths crossed twice.

And then there is the Crystal story, which is maybe my favorite. There were two Crystals in our class, and this one always wore pink. I have apparently always been the kind of person who keeps a quiet headcount of the room, because one afternoon the buses were loading and something just felt wrong to me. Crystal was not on the bus. I had seen her in class, and now she was not here, and it nagged at me until I worked up the nerve to walk to the front of the moving bus (the driver was not thrilled about that) and say, I think we are missing someone, there is a girl named Crystal, she always wears pink, and I think she got left behind.

The driver actually pulled over and let the other buses go and radioed it in. Half the bus was annoyed we were running late. But about ten minutes later they brought us back around to the front door, and out came Crystal, jogging, with a staff member behind her. She had gotten lost or fallen asleep somewhere, I never got the full story. I got a little pat on the back for paying attention. And here is the part that gets me: maybe ten years ago, as an adult, I walked into a gas station near my house for the first time, and there she was, working the counter. The same Crystal. We only had a minute, but we got to reminisce, and I got to be the weird guy going, you were in my very first class.

Mostly what I remember from first grade is how kind it all was. I do not remember being bullied, or really anyone being bullied. It was peaceful. There was a teacher who hugged you at the door, a class full of friendly kids, most of whom rode my bus, and a six-year-old me quietly running the numbers on all of it. A pretty good year, just like I wrote. One thing I’ll never forget is my teacher.

(There is more from these years. I wrote about the first grade portfolio that turned up too.)