School

[susandennis]

I hated school and, not surprisingly, I sucked at it. I was a lazy student given more opportunities than most to achieve and succeed and still I managed to suck at it. And hated it.

I went to public school until the 9th grade. I remember being interested in diagramming sentences (and being good at it) and understanding why it was a good skill to have. It's the only thing I remember even being vaguely interested in.

For high school, my parents sent me to Salem Academy for Girls founded in 1772 and housed in the original building. It was pretty much the last of the old time finishing school for girls. They were moving, then, away from finishing but I still learned to curtsy and tactfully terminate domestic employees. I also learned calculus and the first 52 lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in middle English.

The tightassed snotty old white ladies who were my teachers there actually managed to squeezed some valuable shit into this unwelcoming brain. I fought it tooth and nail but they actually won. I am more than embarrassed when I think of the money and effort that my parents poured into my education and the very little I did to assist.

I remember Septembers as hot and sweaty. The school was in the historic part of Winston-Salem in a little Moravian village. We had to buy books from a little shop that was in the basement of a house like this.

See that little round doorway under the stairs there? That's EXACTLY like the doorway (and may even be THE doorway) of the old bookshop. We had to stand there in line waiting for freakin' ever to get in to buy 4.5 tons of books. Did I mention it was August in North Carolina (and not the cool mountain part either)? The Moravians were not only very short people, they were pre-air conditioning people. The bookshop, the school, none of it was air conditioned.

And school supplies. I love school and office supplies - I have for as long as I can remember. Back then, I was totally subsidized by Mom and Dad and they thought anything more than the basic necessities of school supplies was all I needed. 1 number 2 pencil, 1 notebook, 1 fountain pen, 1 bookbag (and likely the one from last year at that). The end. It was torture.

Now some bazillion and a half years later, September is my favorite time of year. It holds both the promise of cooler weather and even better school supplies every year and no one to tell me I can't have that. It's magical and wonderful and I can still diagram a sentence. If you live long enough...

Comments

[susandennis]

I think I'm loving your library notes. I'm sorry you didn't have a rotten tomato in your bag for your library friend.

[(Anonymous)]

I think I'm kind of loving the library thing! I feel like my internet use is much more efficient when I only have so much time. I'm here again today only because PiLL wanted to come do his internet stuff and he needs a bit of assistance sometimes.

[gordon92151.livejournal.com]

Susan, how old are you? My husband grew up in Winston-Salem. He was born in 1953. Is it possible you two knew each other? I mean, Winston isn't that big.

[susandennis]

57 - 1949 Your husband EXACTLY my baby brother's age. I was Susan Schubert. My brother was Bill Schubert. We lived in the Buena Vista neighborhood until about 1963 and then oh gosh I forgot the name of the neighborhood but our street was Kenleigh Circle and it was really near Wake Forest.

[gordon92151.livejournal.com]

He went to Mt Tabor high. He didn't remember your brother but he said he can't remember anything before last week. Did your brother go to Reynolds?

[gordon92151.livejournal.com]

Your folks might have known his mother's second husband, Nelson Hendricks. And are we not doing that oh-so-southern who-are-your-people thing. Geeze, it's so hard to get away.

[susandennis]

Totally doing the Who's Your Daddy!

And I really blew it with the neighborhood things. Your husband was on it. I should have said Reynolds High School right off the bat. It's where we all would have gone - my sister actually did. My brother was an even bigger looser than I was in the school department. They shipped him off to Maine to a school/underachiever camp-ish kind of thing.

Nelson Hendricks sounds semi familiar name wize but I'm like your husband. I remember the name of the woman in the next cube only because I can see the tag from here.

[vasilatos]

How does one tactfully terminate domestic employees? That could be useful.

[susandennis]

As I recall, the direction was to be kind and tactful and look them in the eye and make sure they understand that they are to either pack up their belongings and get out or not come in tomorrow (depending on live-in/live-out).

I do remember being told that it was ok to let you husband do the terminating if you were too angry.

Of course, it was presumed that the domestic employees were black (well, actually Negro then) and stupid and you were a condescending bitch. It's all about context.

ewwww and ick

[vasilatos]

Oh gross! That isn't even vaguely useful in real life.

I'll stick to fumbling and bumbling and being passive aggressive with folks I can't seem to get to do what I want even when I pay them money.

Diagramming Sentences

[lordjim.livejournal.com]

Before today, I had probably heard diagramming sentences mentioned maybe twice in the past 10 years. Thanks to LJ, that total has now doubled. Besides you, another person on my friends list posted this sentence:

"And beneath the feet of the ancients, and arched over them and over the throne and over the tetramorphic group, arranged in symmetrical bands, barely distinguishable one from another because the artist's skill had made them all so mutually proportionate, united in their variety and varied in their unity, unique in their diversity and diverse in their apt assembly, in wondrous congruency of the parts with the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices among themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring contiued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in the same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes and to vicissitudes reduced, work of amorous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and wordly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and figure), numerous and resplendent equality through the shining of the form over the proportionate parts of the material--there, all the flowers and leaves and vines and bushes and corymbs were entwined, all of the grasses that adorn the gardens of earth and heaven, violet, cystus, thyme, lily, privet, narcissus, taro, acanthus, mallow, myrrh, and Mecca balsam."

with the title Diagram this Sentence

Re: Diagramming Sentences

[susandennis]

You pop up at the oddest times for the oddest entries... You are like my Mystery Friend! It's wonderful.

And I love the sentence. And I am so glad that I'm not the only Ljer who's responsible for your continuing education. It's a burden that needs sharing.

[dizzdvl.livejournal.com]

fountain pens! *drool*

[tmb2005.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. September always has the sense of a fresh start, and I love school and office supplies. I think that if I quit my job and went to work at Staples I would probably be deliriously happy. (And diagramming sentences is also fun - I think it's making all the elements relate to each other visually that is the appeal.)

[susandennis]

ohmygod... working at Staples??!! I'd lose my mind. Even at Office Max or Office Depot... My paycheck would be gone in 10 minutes.

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

I always loved school. Mostly because I was good at it, I found it easy, and so it was the one area in my life where I could excel [as opposed to, say, sports, being a social animal and relating to people, etc.]. I was the kid who won all the awards. School was my turf. I'm the geek you hated.

I used to think I was blessed, cuz I knew so many kids who loathed a major chunk of their lives on a daily basis and I managed to avoid that. Now I'm not so sure...

My daughter is like a better version of me. She finds school easy, she does well, and she likes it okay. Sometimes she's top of her class, sometimes she's not quite, and she's cool with it either way. Whereas, to me, it mattered. She doesn't stake so much of herself on her grades. She's a way cooler kid than I was.

My son hates school and always has. And I realize that I find this difficult to relate to. I don't always offer him the kind of help and support he needs. When he needs help with homework, I approach it from the perspective of "he feels bad that he can't do this, but once he learns how, he will derive joy from having finally gotten his head round a new academic skill". But I finally clued in that his perspective is more like "it's stupid that I even have to learn how to do this in the first place, why does it matter so much that I learn how to do this stupid useless thing, and once I get my head round it, that just means I wasted an hour of my life learning to do this instead of doing something that matters".

It must be tough to hate school and have a school-geek dad... :\

[susandennis]

Actually, I think as a kid, you assume all grownups are over achieving geeks and always have been. I love your description of your son's perspective. It's the EXACT feeling I had every single day until I graduated from college. Even today when some adult talks about wanting to go back to school, my brain equates that with wanting to get a root canal or wanting to wade through the landfill on a hot and humid afternoon.

On the upside, defying all predictions, I think I turned out ok.