Second grade, and the gingerbread hall pass

My second grade teacher was Mrs. Schnelker. Funny enough, she shows up in my first grade yearbook, but back then she was listed as a preschool teacher. So somewhere between my first year and my second year she went from teaching preschool to teaching second grade, and that is the grade I landed in with her.

She seemed new. New the way you can tell when someone is still figuring out the job, and I think that was more or less true. And I will be honest, she and I did not click the way I had with my first grade teacher. I went from a teacher who genuinely lit up to see me and handed out hugs at the door to one who was more reserved, more standoffish, who I am not sure ever saw me as one of her favorites. It was never a bad thing exactly. It was just cooler, and a seven-year-old feels the temperature drop.

The nice coda is that maybe twenty-five years later, long after I had graduated and become a computer programmer, I looked her up at what turned out to be exactly the right moment. She had climbed the ranks to run the preschool or kindergarten program out of a different building, and she was retiring that very year. I sent her an email. Congratulations, I was a second grade student of yours, I do not know if you remember me. She wrote back, all warm, and I was really glad I caught her in time to say it.

The gingerbread hall pass

Okay. Here is a story I have basically never told anyone.

At the start of the year she made gingerbread cookies, and one of them was the bathroom hall pass. You would loop the gingerbread cookie around your wrist and carry it with you to the bathroom. Now, I was a kid who had heard about gingerbread my whole life, always at Christmas, but as far as I could remember we never actually made it at home. So I had this burning, unanswered question: what does gingerbread taste like?

You see where this is going. One day, holding the hall pass, I decided to find out. I took a bite of the bathroom pass. It was, and I cannot stress this enough, revolting. I spit it out and wanted nothing more than to go rinse my mouth out, which, conveniently, I had a pass to do. Somewhere in there it dawned on me that I should not be eating the communal bathroom pass. And as an adult I have a follow up question of my own: why on earth would you make the hall pass out of food and hand it to a room of second graders? Surely she knew at least one of us was dumb enough to try it. Reader, I was that one.

My mom at the zoo

We took a field trip to the zoo that year, and my parents both worked a lot, so it was a big deal when my mom signed up to be a chaperone. I still remember the exact moment she came through the classroom door. My whole face, my whole body, my whole little soul just lit up. My mom was going to be there. With me. On the field trip. There are not many feelings as pure as that one, and I got to have it.

What I actually learned

We hatched baby chicks that year. There was an incubator with eggs, and we would check on them, and eventually they hatched into actual chicks, which is about as magical as school gets. I learned about weather for the first time, and the days of the week, and we started creeping up into bigger addition and subtraction, which I loved. I always loved adding and subtracting. There was story time, and games, and I was still completely devoted to PE because I loved to run.

The first computer that snuck in

Here is the part I keep turning over. There was no computer in that classroom. To this day I have no idea where my pull toward computers came from, because nothing in that room should have planted it.

Except, maybe, the lunchroom. At some point they switched the cafeteria over to a computer system. You still paid cash, but you had to punch a four digit code into a number pad that sat on the counter. I think it was quietly brilliant, actually. Some kids were on government lunches, some had prepaid accounts, some paid cash, and instead of any of that being visible, everyone did the exact same thing: punch in your code, get your tray. Same process for every kid, no one singled out.

I still remember that PIN. My brother’s was the same code, one number higher. And I am not going to tell you what it is, because, well, let us just say a four digit code you memorized at age seven has a way of following you onto a lot of other keypads later in life. So there is a PIN. That is all you get.

I think we also went to the Science Center, the one with the bridge over the highway where you could clock the speed of the cars passing underneath. There were probably a hundred other second grade memories I am leaving out. But the chicks, the gingerbread, my mom at the zoo, and that lunchroom keypad are the ones that stuck. (The other survivor from this year is my second grade autobiography.)