fiction:: 4th GRADE REALLY SUCKED, pt. 5

There were many public parks. Fairly big ones. Some with swingsets, some without. I learned later that this was a strategy designed to block the government from taking certain unclaimed lands which otherwise could have been targeted for future housing project sites.

Thus, my mother and I trekked everywhere within that fifteen mile radius. She waited in her heated car while I did a crayon etching of an old tombstone. She nodded politely while the town hall custodian lectured about the Fire of 1934 when the water supply fell dangerously low during an inexplicable drought. And she smiled patiently as we traversed the flooded basement floor of Willow Glens' first "mansion" ever built. It had once been inhabited by a chemist who made his fortune selling patents, one of which was for a carpet cleaning agent that repelled fleas. The questionnaires were due every Monday. We didn't get grades for them, nor a grade for that quarter, because Miss Cunningham explained to the parents at Open House that there would be - and should be - no grades for hands-on projects such as this. We all had to take home a permission slip for our parents to sign, basically acknowledging that grades would only serve to undermine the natural interest in our heritage.

All the parents signed on and it was tombstones and log cabins 'til Christmas break.

But that still wasn't the reason I hated Miss Cunningham. To be truthful, it didn't bother me that we weren't getting grades that quarter. For a lot of kids, myself included, that meant one less glaring C on the report card, one less thing to be average in. Instead, we would all be sharing equally in what we knew to be a lie. To a lot of us, and our parents, that was preferable.