by Minda Magero

Created on: April 22, 2008

My first day at primary school was nothing like my dreams had been. It was January, and I would be turning six that June. Having already spent 3 years in Kindergarten-the third one simply because I wasn't yet old enough to join primary school-I was rather excited about this new phase of life and learning.

In those days, all Kindergarten graduates were assigned to a class or grade called Pre-Primary, where we would earn the right and privilege to join Standard One (First Grade) a year later. My first memory of that day is the sublime pleasure of playing hop scotch in the mid morning sun with perfect strangers from Pre-Primary. I was just beginning to bond with my playmates when I was suddenly whisked away and deposited to a noisy classroom overflowing with over a hundred First Graders, proud graduates of Pre-Primary. Teachers were assigning students to the three streams that made up First Grade: Red, Yellow or Blue. I glimpsed Dora, a family friend and a familiar face in the crowd, and hurried over to where she was, fervently hoping that we'd be assigned to the same stream. Alas, when our names were called out, I was assigned to 1R and Dora to 1Y!

Joy and laughter turned into bewilderment and sadness later that day as I came face-to-face with another group of perfect strangers: my First Grade classmates. They all knew each other from the year spent together in Pre-Primary, and I immediately became the outsider. Unlike the Pre-Primary crowd, the girls of 1R were vicious and unforgiving: kicking me in the shin and taunting me for I-knew-not-what, while I stood there wondering, "What have I done?" Years later it would dawn on me that maybe they resented the fact that I had skipped Pre-Primary and gone straight to First Grade. Perhaps the fact that my mother was a teacher at that same school only exacerbated the situation. Throughout my tenure in primary school, my parents made sure that I was a year ahead of my class in learning, a practice that had resulted in my testing out of Pre-Primary and being placed in First Grade.

This unfavorable beginning to my primary school days notwithstanding, my pleasant memories of primary school far outweigh my unpleasant ones. My favorite subjects were Math, English, Handwriting and Spelling, but especially Spelling. We each possessed a tiny red vocabulary book from which words to learn were assigned each week. At week's end we would sit a spelling test, and how I looked forward to it! There, my love for words began, out of which

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