Monday Memories: Specials

I'm only calling these 'Specials' because that's what my kids' school called them and I don't remember if I had a name for them as a kid. What I'm talking about are the extra classes we had in addition to the reading/writing/arithmetic in elementary school. When I was that age, we had Music, Art and Gym class. My kids also had Computer Lab, but that was mere sci-fi in my day.

Being at the tail end of the Baby Boomer Era, my elementary school had no empty classrooms. The gymnasium did triple duty as the cafeteria for lunch and auditorium for assemblies. The school library was in a glorified closet and only 6 students were allowed in there at a time. Therefore, we didn't actually go to Music or Art. It came to us.

My favorite was Music. The music teacher had an upright piano on wheels that she pushed from classroom to classroom. I loved singing the songs, reading the lyrics from mimeographed sheets of paper or from an overhead projector. She also had a record player on a cart. I distinctly remember my favorite song that we sang was This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie. 

In third grade, we learned to read music and play the recorder. Only we had the cheaper version, called the flutophone. For added excitement, sometimes the teacher would bring a basket of other simple instruments to play, such as the tambourine, hand bells, triangle, and guiro.

I was indifferent to Art. The teacher wasn't all that friendly and it was just art on a cart, meaning she wheeled a cart of supplies to your classroom. And by supplies, I mean construction paper, white drawing paper, and every great once in a while, acrylic paint. While my own kids learned about all the famous artists and then modeled the methods (eg., Georges Seurat's pointillism) into their own masterpieces, we were relegated to drawing from 'our imagination.' I guess I was sorely lacking in that department because I remember just sitting there with my pencil, bored silly.

The only thing that sparked my interest back then was the annual Halloween poster contest in which each student created a poster which hung in the halls. There was a first, second, and third place winner for each grade level (ours was a K-6 school). My significant ego held high hopes for a ribbon each year, even though I had zero talent. In 6th grade, I truly believed my haunted house with window flaps that opened to reveal scary monsters was going to win. Reality was, the same boy won every year in my grade. 

My least favorite (or you could say, most hated) special was Gym. I was not a fan of the boring calisthenics we did at the beginning of each class, nor did I like the other, more aggressive participants. For me, field hockey was okay because I had a hockey stick to protect myself. Volleyball and basketball, no bueno. Don't get me started on dodge ball. The Presidential Physical Fitness Award week was sheer torture. It would have been nice to have been practicing some of those skills throughout the school year, but nope, we were suddenly expected to do 50 sit ups out of the blue.

 Tumbling, you might ask? I could do a forward roll, but self-preservation prevented me from doing things that I thought might involve literally breaking my neck, say like a backwards roll or a headstand. Give me parachute day and I was a happy camper. Oh, and those two days of square dancing every year were right up my alley. Do Si Do and Allemande Left!

I will leave you with the tortuous gym class song of my youth:

**All photos came from google images**