The Schools I Attended, Part 1

For the next couple weeks I'm going to be giving you a visual tour of the Brooklyn that I grew up in. I started yesterday by showing you the homes I lived in. Today, in part one of school installment, we'll be looking at the first two schools I attended:

The Neighborhood Playground, my first school
It was in an Episcopal Church, around the corner from home
Eric went there too, then the church kicked the school out

The first school I ever attended was the Neighborhood Playground. It was a nursery school around the corner from our house on Tompkins Place, at the corner of Clinton and Kane. A close friend of my parents, Jackie, ran the school. I attended for two years, and learned to play with other children and to share. I also learned that I did not enjoy napping. Jackie and her husband, Harvey, are still some of my parent's closest friends, and they were the only people not related to me to attend my graduation from Skidmore. (Harvey and my Dad go back to the days before I was born, and before my parents were married) At this point, Harvey and Jackie have known me longer than almost anyone else I know, and are practically family. Their annual Chanukkah Party is not to be missed. But I'm getting side tracked. At Jackie's school I met four of my best childhood friends: Lee, Andy, Rachel, and Rachel.

This was the garden where all the children played
There was a pool in the summer, and climbing structures all the time
It was a fun place to be a kid

My brother also went to the Neighborhood Playground, but a few years after he had graduated, the church that housed the school decided they could make better use of the space and kicked Jackie out, effectively putting an end to a neighborhood tradition. After finishing my two years at the Neighborhood Playground I attended the local public elementary school, PS 29, which is on Henry Street, between Kane and Baltic Streets.

I developed my street cred at this public school
I had so much cred, that I left after only 3 years,
so as not to terrorize the neighborhood.

When I was younger, I always thought this building looked like a castle. Now I think it looks like a school. I entered PS 29 in Kindergarten, and my teacher was Ms. Franco (sp?). We had a sandbox in our room, which was quite a privilege, we were told. I did things that one does in Kindergarten, like paint, and draw, and have books read to me. I also remember finger painting with some kind of chocolate paint. We had a coat room in our classroom, and I vaguely remember a big hullabaloo among the parents when a little boy named Nathan exposed his penis to a little girl in the coat room. Clearly, this was a pervert in the making, and not a little kid who didn't know any better. Ah kindergarten...

This is what you see when approaching the school from my house
There is a big black-top school yard where we played
I always wanted to go onto the roof, but never got the chance.

In the first grade my teacher was Ms. Rothman, and in second grade my teacher was Ms. Patterson. I remember desks with built-in cubbie holes arranged in large clusters, and I remember taking lots and lots of "city-wides," tests with bubble sheets. In first grade we finished our curriculum a few weeks before the school year ended, and wound up playing board games for three weeks. Great planning Ms. Rothman!

There aren't too many other stand-out memories from those years (certainly none like those from kindergarten), except for Christmas time in second grade, when I remember someone giving our teacher a wallet for the holiday, even though she had told us not to buy her gifts. I also remember being thoroughly confused at the difference between two, to, and too. I suppose that some things will never change. There were lessons in cursive, and daunting chapter books. There was "computer class," which involved Commodore 64s and 5 1/4 floppy drive, and programs like Logo Writer. Oh, those were the days... There were also incompetent teachers protected by the union, like our science teacher Mr. Wallace, and there hairy lunch ladies who served glop from a trough. I suppose that that probably hasn't changed either. All in all, it was a pretty fun experience. I met several more of my close childhood friends at PS 29: Daniel, Hunter, and Jenna.

At PS 29 I was tracked into the gifted program. On the one hand, this was a good thing as it meant that the school system saw that I was a smart kid. (I know, I know. What happened?) On the other hand, it was a bad thing, as it was not initially recognized that I had a pretty severe learning disability, and was slow in learning to read and write. For this reason my parents decided to pull me out of the public school system after the second grade, and entered me in the Packer Collegiate Institute. At Packer, because the age cut-off was different than it was at public school, I had to repeat the second grade. On the one hand, this sucked because I had to explain to all the other 7 year olds why I had already done second grade. On the other hand, it was good because I was now matched with kids who were closer to both my physical and developmental age. I stayed at Packer until they kicked me out at the end of high school, but more on that tomorrow, when I'm back with part two...