GOING TO THE OFFICE

During my eight years in elementary school I was sent to the office three times. Two of these were justified, but one was absolutely unfair and uncalled for. The easiest way to describe them, I believe, is in chronological order.

In the first grade I had a maternal, but strict teacher named Mrs. Whitfield. One day she went out of the room but before she left, she told us that if anyone was out of his/her seat when she returned, that person would be sent to the office. After she left, we were all good for a while, but for some strange reason I will never know, I stood up just seconds before she came back into the room. I will never forget running down the hall towards the office, crying, while Mrs. Whitfield came behind me hitting her yardstick on the floor. Mrs. Mathis, a veritable terror of a principal (even though she was less than five feet tall), talked to me a few minutes and sent me back to the room. That was my first experience of seeing the inside of her office.

The second is painful for me to recall because it was so unjust. We second graders were at lunch and our teacher was collecting our money at the end of the cafeteria line. I had brought my lunch, so I was only buying milk that cost 5 cents. Mother had given me five pennies and I had my hand poised over the penny bowl to drop in the money when she turned away for a second. During that time I dropped in two or three of the pennies and had the others ready to go. SHE thought I had taken the two pennies OUT of the bowl and was pretending to have dropped them in. In other words, she was accusing me of stealing five pennies from the bowl. I have thought and thought about that incident and I just can’t imagine why she would think that of me --- to my knowledge, I had never given her any reason to suspect me of cheating or stealing. But I can speculate that perhaps someone else had been dipping into the till and she was suspicious of everyone. At any rate, I can still remember the shock of her accusations and how mortified I was all throughout lunch, knowing I would have to go face Mrs. Mathis again. But that lady dismissed me quickly after she heard my story and that was that. It was a traumatic experience for a second grader to have to go through, however, and I have never forgotten the feeling of injustice I had that day.

The third time was when I was in the fifth grade. Several of us girls had been acting up, I believe, and we were all sent to see Mr. Thompson, a new principal. He took his paddle out of his drawer and placed it on his desk, while we were all watching wide-eyed. He informed us that he wasn’t above paddling girls if it were called for and he didn’t want to see us back in there. That did it for me. Except for the second half of my seventh grade year (when I probably needed a good paddling) I was a model student.

But that’s another story. It’s enough to say now that I managed to avoid the principal’s office for the rest of my education.