Mrs. Davis, and the year I should have learned my times tables

My third grade teacher was Mrs. Davis. She turns up in my first grade yearbook too, already a third grade teacher back then, so she had stayed put while I caught up to her. Blonde hair, kind of frizzy and curly in that very 1990s way, round spectacle glasses like my first grade teacher wore, and on the shorter side.

Third grade felt like reaching the big leagues, and I mean that almost literally. For the first time my classroom was on the second story. First and second grade I had been parked right by the front door, but now I got to walk in, climb a flight of stairs, and head all the way down a long hallway that I think belonged to the fourth graders, which intimidated me to no end, through a set of heavy fire doors, a quick right, a quick left, and there was my room. It overlooked a little parking lot on the west side, a totally new view, up high in the air. I felt important. I felt like I had made it.

The classroom

Like every room in that school it had a sink, but Mrs. Davis had done something clever with hers. She screwed a little plastic attachment onto the faucet, the kind that turns a tap into a drinking fountain, a Donald Duck one if I remember right. It lived behind a Japanese folding screen she had set up to make a little private corner. The whole point was that nobody had to interrupt her all day to ask for a drink of water. You just slipped behind the screen, got your water, and went back to your seat. Smart.

All the rooms also had these big chunky air conditioning units sitting in front of the windows, and you could climb up and sit on one and let the cold air blast over you. Kids loved to do that, or to talk into the giant fan and hear it chop your voice into funny sounds.

The multiplication tapes

Here is the thing third grade is welded to in my memory. This was the year they started playing audio tapes of multiplication facts, and I am pretty sure getting us to learn our times tables was one of Mrs. Davis’s missions in life. She felt strict to me, and honestly that is most of where the strict feeling came from.

I did not master them. Not that year, not in fourth grade when a new district started testing us on them, not in middle school, not really ever. For a long time it felt like a quiet drag on my whole education, this one foundational thing I had slipped past without locking down. I still do not know my multiplication facts as well as I should. It is one of those things I have always meant to just sit down and fix, properly, once and for all, and somehow never have. Mrs. Davis, if you are reading this, you were right, and I am sorry about the tapes.

The cello

This was also the year extracurriculars opened up, and I signed on for the strings program. I picked cello. I have no idea why. My parents did not have the money to buy or even rent one, so the school gave me a free one, which meant I was not like the kids who got to take their instrument home whenever they wanted. I had to share mine, so it only came home once in a while, and eventually the whole picture of a little third grader lugging a full size cello around got pretty absurd.

But I loved it. I wanted to keep going with strings. I did performances that year, and I remember doing things alongside my friend Amber, who was learning the violin, and it was just a genuinely good time. The sad part is that when we moved and I started fourth grade, the new school did not offer strings, and that was the end of the cello for me.

A teacher who spent everything on us

Looking back through the binder of work I still have from her, you can see how much she put in. There was barely a computer in sight in 1996, but you could tell she was using one somewhere to crank out all these fill in the blank sheets and surveys and notes home. And she had us writing constantly. I have these little bound notebooks and string bound booklets I do not even remember making, and when I think about it, the logic clicks: twenty kids each write an autobiography, copy it out enough times for the whole class, and everyone goes home with a bound book of all of them. She laminated everything. She clearly poured school resources, and probably plenty of her own money, the way teachers do, into making us better.

She gave us a line that year that I have kept:

You never fail unless you stop trying.

I do not think I fully understood, sitting up there in the big leagues, that this was the end of my time at Marvin. But it was. By the time that summer came around, we were gone. (The other piece of this year that survived is my third grade memory book.)