A Step Below Tertiary

I have been remiss in my promise to write stories from specific years in my life. I realize this. However, I am not sure that it is a problem. The stories I have written about my life in the First and minus-First year of school were, on the whole, not interesting. Except for the Valentine's Day one. That one makes me laugh every time! Now, I'm not one to go back on my words, but, well, I won't go back on my words. Get ready for second grade because it will be spectacular!

My second grade teach was named Mr. Smith, a most boring name to be sure. However, this same Mr. Smith was the maker of a decidedly non-boring chocolate cake. Each week, on Friday, he would bring in a chocolate cake and give a spelling test. The two were linked in that, if you earned 100% on your spelling test, you got a piece of that cake. This brought about the curious attitude among the 2nd graders of wanting other people to fail. The fewer students earning 100%, the bigger the piece of cake each one received. It was essentially a physical and culinary representation of schadenfreude. The top spellers revelled in the poor spelling of the others. Being introduced to this in the second grade has profound beneficial impacts. The sooner you stop deluding yourself about the nature of the world, the better. Also, I never didn't get 100%, so the feelings of the kids who didn't never mattered to me. Okay, there was one time that I didn't get 100% but that was because I wasn't there for the test, I was out at a Yakibatics performance (that will need to be a post in itself. It's just coming back to me now and is so weird that I'm having a hard time believing it was real). I did, however, get to clean the pan, meaning that I got to scour the pan for any crumbs that were left.

So, you're probably wondering amazing things I did in the second grade. Well, I'll tell you. We played Silentball. I will tell you the rules of Silentball.

1. You do not talk in Silentball


2. You do not talk in Silentball


3. You must sit on your desk at all times


4. You cannot pass the ball to someone without first making eye contact with them


5. You cannot drop the ball

If you fail to follow those rules, you are summarily kicked out of the game. There were several of us in the class who were quite good at silentball, and even fewer who were actually so into it that we would willingly forfeit part of our precious recess time to determine the winner. Oh, how I regret that now. The ignorance of youth is heartbreaking.


If you are seeing a pattern of ruthless competition here, well, don't expect it to stop now. Apparently that was Mr. Smith's thing.

You see, we also had math bees (we had spelling bees too, but everyone does. Speaking of spelling bees, I once eliminated myself by misspelling "window." To this day, I am convinced that I actually spelled it right and that Mr. Smith was the one who was mistaken). What is a math bee, you might ask? It's where the teacher stands in front of the class and divides the class into two parallel lines. He/She then shows a flash card. Of the two students at the heads of the respectives lines, the one who says the answer to the math problem on the flash card first is the winner and heads to the back of his/her line. The loser must sit down. It's like Machiavelli meets math. You just keep doing that until only one person is left standing. The winner gets some candy or something. The losers (all but the winner, there is no second place) get nothing. In my class, the math bee winner was either me or John Pham basically every time. John thinks that he won more often than I, but he's kidding himself. The one time I specifically remember winning, John and I dueled it out through all the addition, subtraction and multiplication cards. I finally sealed the deal when we started in on division. It was as epic as two 8 year-olds standing there answering math problems could possibly be.