I have always been a firm believer that a child's perception of things is very critical during the time of elementary school . I think it takes a lot of patience to work in that setting and to be a teacher who is able to look outside the box and encourage a child's imagination when teaching subjects like art and music, ect. For example, my mom always tells us that she knew she would never be an artist because when she was in first grade her teacher told her the windows on the house she drew were too big. Something so small being said can affect a person for their entire life. It could close doors that were never really opened enough to explore the creativity and challenges that might have been able to be pursued.

Believe it or not, from Kindergarten to half-way through second grade, I was a talker. All of my report cards during that time of my life display a statement or 2 about how socially interactive I was and that sometimes, I had a hard time staying quiet when I was supposed to.

When I was in second grade, I found that liking my teacher Mrs. Tyndall was quite a challenge for me. There was another girl in the class with the last name "Long" and she was constantly confusing her name with mine (with my last name being "Short".) I mean seriously? How hard is it to get that straight? It was during her class that I remember getting my first multiple choice quiz where you had to color in the right circle with a number 2 pencil for the answer that you had chosen. She just passed them out and didn't explain how to do it...so I colored in all (and I mean every stinkin' one of them) of the circles for each question. (A little of my OCD coming out in my early years.) My friend sitting beside me had done the same thing because she hadn't understood how to do it either. Later, she called us to her desk and bluntly accused us of cheating. I wasn't even sure what that meant, but we were made to take the test again (after she rightfully explained how to do it). Somehow though, I felt like I was being punished.

The big day that I now look back on and can pinpoint when I started being so shy, was when I was sitting quietly at my desk in the back of the classroom, playing with a rope string that had come out of my shorts earlier in the day. I had tied it completely around my desk and was rotating it back and forth. Mrs. Tyndall told me to stop it and pay attention to the lesson. She didn't take it away from me. She just left the sting sitting there on my desk offering up temptation that no 7 year old can truly pass up. So, I waited a few minutes and then continued to play with my string. She interrupted class again and told me to stop. People were starting to stare. But again. She just left it there on my desk. It was like the forbidden string was taunting me, asking me to continue to play with it, telling me that it was no big deal. If it had of been , it wouldn't be sitting there anymore. So...taking all of this into consideration, I started playing with it for a third time.

Mrs. Tyndall lost her patience. Suddenly, she was towering over my desk, in my face, yelling at me in front of all of my fellow classmates. True. I wasn't paying attention. True. I didn't listen to what she had asked me to do. True...she was an evil bitch and must be destroyed....(Where did that come from?)

But seriously, all she had to do was take it away from me in the first place. It was too much to expect out of a little second grader to resist that sort of temptation. I wasn't back-talking. I wasn't disturbing anybody else. I was just playing in my own little world. In fact, SHE interrupted ME, now that I think about it.

And I was never the same. My report cards were never sent home again with the phrase "she's social but has a hard time keeping quiet during nap time." I went from one extreme to another...all because I was constantly being embarrassed in front of my classmates and I didn't want to be the freak. So I started to stay quiet and silently continued (and still do at times) to live in my own little happy world. And nobody, not even a mean, second grade teacher can take that away from me.