Mrs. Rudy, Miss Ruby, and the iMac I couldn't touch
Fifth grade at Wentzville West, a quieter year. Two teachers with nearly the same name, Apple II computers in a room with no business having them, and a brand-new iMac I was forbidden to go near.
Fifth grade was not a big year, so I will keep this one shorter. We moved up to the higher part of the building, got the desks with the cubby underneath for your books and supplies, and mostly just did a quieter, carbon copy version of fourth grade. No camp this time, no single huge event. Just a normal year. But a few things are worth pinning down.
Two teachers, almost one name
My fifth grade teacher was Mrs. Rudy. She was very nice, with a short haircut, and this was the first year I ever had a second adult in the room, a trainee teacher who would step in and take over sometimes.
It was also the year my schoolwork started to wobble. I had fallen behind in reading and spelling, so I began getting pulled out of class to a special room for extra help. And here is where it gets confusing, because the teacher in that room was named Miss Ruby. Mrs. Rudy and Miss Ruby. I am not making that up. She had red hair, she was strict, and we never really warmed to each other. Mostly what I remember is the feeling of being the kid who got pulled out, which made me feel slow and a little stupid, fair or not. That was my first real taste of falling behind, and it would not be my last. Things would get genuinely rough by middle school, but that is a story for those posts.
The computers made no sense
Here is the part that still bugs the computer nerd in me. My fifth grade classroom, in 1998, had Apple II machines in it. Green monochrome screens, big five and a quarter inch floppies, the works. Meanwhile the actual computer class down the hall had nice modern Macs. I have no idea what the school’s purchasing department was doing.
And then there was Miss Ruby’s room. Because sitting in there, in the room I got sent to for being behind, was a brand new iMac G3, the gorgeous translucent all in one, in a deep red. Standalone floppy drive next to it and everything. We were never, ever allowed to touch it. Picture it: a ten year old who already loved computers more than anything, parked in the one room with the coolest machine in the whole school, forbidden to go near it. It drove me a little crazy.
Because I wanted one so badly. Those iMacs were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I still have a poster of the whole fruit colored lineup in my basement, the “yum” one, the “think different” era. But we were a Windows family at home, because a Mac was not in the budget, and that was genuinely fine, not a tragedy, just a fact. So I did what a lot of kids like me did: I reskinned my Windows machine to look like a Mac and dreamed. (I did eventually start collecting old Macs. There is a dead blue iMac G3 in my closet right now, killed by a bad flyback transformer, that I keep meaning to fix. That is a whole post for another day.)
The rest of it
Fifth grade was also just about meeting new people as the classes got reshuffled. I think it was the first year I ever shared a class with my friend Anna, who was a genuinely fun person to be around, and who stayed a friend all the way through middle and high school. There were surely others, but I do not have yearbooks from these years, so a lot of the faces have gone soft in my memory.
Mostly the air was starting to fill with middle school nerves. Everyone was buzzing about what came next: band or not, which electives, what PE would be like. I will get into all of that in the sixth grade post.
That is honestly about it. I was an average student that year, not yet in trouble. A perfectly ordinary fifth grade, two near identical teacher names, and one beautiful red computer I was not allowed to lay a finger on.