Tuesday June 7, 2005
12:30 - 2:30pm
“I’ve never seen a mechanism like that before – I only thought they existed in cartoons”
I was a little confused by this comment, so I asked the boy what he meant. He was talking about my packing tape dispenser. “Usually they have this other thing,” he said.
“Packing tape’s a pain when you have to find the end cause it’s really hard to see…and then when you finally see it, it’s almost impossible to get it with your fingers…and then you have to use scissors…this is a lot easier. I just put the tape on with one hand,” I said.
“It’s just like scotch tape,” said the girl who was playing with him, “only it’s bigger and less scotchy. Haaahhh…less scotchy!” she giggled.
They asked me why I was putting up the posters. After I told them, the boy asked me if the school was there when I was a kid.
“Yeah, it was there.”
“Was the extension there, or just the old part?”
“I’m pretty sure the extension was there.”
“Oh.” He looked shocked, “That’s old. Did you know that when this school was first built it was the only school in Markham?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“We have this substitute teacher who is, like, 85 years old and she said that in the beginning there were just two classrooms, one for the older grades and one for the younger grades.”
“Wow! She must like teaching if she’s still doing it when she’s 85!” I said.
“Well…. she’s just a substitute.”
“Wasn’t there four classrooms? There are four classrooms in the old part.”
“I don’t know. She told us two.”
“Maybe they changed it later to make four rooms.” He turned to me to ask, “Do you know the part of the school that’s next to the Grade Eight part?”
I told him that I’ve never actually been inside the school. He went into a long description of the layout of the school so that I could understand where he was talking about.
“In that part, on the wall, there’s a family tree.”
“Of all the families that first came to the school?” Both kids nodded. “Wow! This is interesting. You guys are like my History teachers today. Hey - are you guys supposed to be on this side of the fence?”
It was lunch recess and I just realized that there were lots of kids huddled up against the other side of the fence, but these two kids were the only two standing on the side closest to the road.
“Yeah, it’s okay. As long as we don’t go far.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want you two to get into trouble.”
"Yeah, it’s fine. We can go the whole way on this side in the Run Walk Club.”
“Is that like Track and Field?”
“No, it’s more like for fitness.”
“Oh! That’s a great idea!”
“If you go all the way around twice, you’ve gone one kilometre. If you just go around once, it’s half and kilometre. We get these cards with circles on them and when you go one kilometre, you get to colour in one of the circles and when you fill in six circles, you get a sticker. A golden running shoe sticker.”
“Hey, you guys! You aren’t supposed to be on that side of the fence!” This helpful advice came from a third boy, who was urgently running towards us. The girl ran over to the other side immediately.
The boy said, “It’s okay. We haven’t gone far.”
“Na-aaah! You’re not supposed to be over there!”
The first boy looked at me, then looked at the other kids, then back at me. He slowly walked to the other side. Mission accomplished, the second boy ran away to talk to some other friends.
“You know that boy who just came over?” I nodded, “ Well, each time we get a substitute bus driver, he goes up to them and asks, ‘Do you want to hear me sing?’ My sister hates it! Last time he did it, my sister was screaming ‘Say no! Say no!’ from the back of the bus!”
“Hey! What are those posters about?” These kids were sitting in a circle on the grass in the back corner of the park. They must have been in Grade Eight, but they somehow seemed older to me.
“Oh. Cool. Laura’s going to freak out when she finds out.”
“So, like, what are you going to do, you know, when it’s all finished?”
“Cool.”
“Yeah, cool.”
“So why are the dates all different?”
“Oh my God! Laura’s going to spaz!”
“Wait! I don’t understand!”
“Oh! Now I get it!”
“That sounds cool.”
“That Laura, she’s insane!”
“Yeah, she’s going to go nuts when we tell her.”
Finally, I asked them what the deal was with Laura: did she have some weird theory about the posters? Why was she going to freak out?
“No, she just got all, like, freaked out because the dates weren’t the same, like the days of the week were different and it was a different year. She’d tear down the posters and run around, carrying them like this and screaming, “The dates are different!!!! The dates are different!!!”