My dad, even when he retires, even though he's taught fifth grade and seventh grade and been the librarian, will always be, to me, a sixth grade teacher. He has a podium, he reads Save Queen of Sheba and lets them play Silent Ball if they've behaved and finished their work. He complains about the lazy ones, the dumb ones, the miscreants (for whom he has soft spots, although he won't really admit it) and the boring ones. The smart ones he remembers for years and years. Just this morning when I called to say Happy Father's Day, he told me he'd just finished with the smartest class he'd had in a long time, possibly even smarter than Laura McLaughlin. Laura McLaughlin is probably thirty-five years old, and Laura is not her name, but for the life of me I can't remember which 'L' name it is, and my dad will probably email me tomorrow with a correction.
For me, sixth graders will always be the Big Kids, the top of the elementary school heap. Even now that I know what sixth graders are like- smelly, loud, on the verge of great hormonal angst- I still think of them as the kids I wanted to be, the kids my dad liked best.
When I was in fifth grade, my dad taught sixth grade down the hall. He actually taught a fifth-sixth split and my best friend was in his class. She loved him (everyone loved him) and always gave me a full report on who got kicked out and who was made to look silly. My best friend was cute and blond and whip smart and there were three other girls in that class just like her. My dad would come home raving about his Girls, the smartest cutest cleverest nicest girls he'd ever had. I remember all their names, I even remember some of the stories he told about them over dinner.
I couldn't stand them. For one thing, three out of the four had long beautiful blond hair and this vexed me to no end. If there was one thing in the world I would never be, it was blond. (And, being the daughter of people who didn't believe in children getting anywhere near pantyhose, New Kids On The Block tapes and hairspray, I was the only ten-year-old in the universe who didn't have perfectly crafted waterfall bangs.) And they weren't just cute, they were sixth grade geniuses. I hated hearing about how smart they were, what they had thought up for school projects and what particularly brilliant answer one of them came up with to a question about the Civil War. I DIDN'T CARE. I was ten, chubby, four-eyed and cursed with stringy brown hair. I may have been in the top reading group, but the Civil War bored me to death and I was never going to be one of the cute smartypants girls my dad talked about so much.
My dad taught my sister Katie. He talks about Katie the way he talked about Angie and Shanna and Kemper. "I had to cheat against Katie," he says proudly, "just to make sure she wouldn't win!" He never taught me (Katie swears this wasn't instant social death, but my God, can you even imagine having your dad send the boy you think is cute to the principal's office?) but I would like to think he would have had to cheat against me too.
I think I turned out all right. I haven't really accomplished anything spectacular, I don't have an amazing job or plans to find one, I'm still chubby and four-eyed and dark-haired, but I earn a decent living and visit my grandmother and provided him with a saintly and technologically-adept son-in-law. I will listen to his tirades on the war, or the state of teaching, or how he's faring on the South Beach diet and find all of it interesting- that must count for something. I tell him about the crazy people I work with and what I'm reading and how I feel guilty about whatever it is I feel guilty about that week, and he will laugh at me, because he knows I ended up with the entire allotment of guilt complex gene in our family. I talk about what it's like being married and being part of someone else's family, and he wants to know what I think about our family, what kind of dad he is. And I have to say, he's not bad at the whole dad thing.
He lets me know if he likes something I've written, and that means more than 100 comments or my boss bending over backwards to create a job for me or getting to spend a week in Hawaii. For a moment or two I am an eleven-year-old skinny blond girl with an upturned nose and a brain like a Civil War encyclopedia, praised for my cleverness over my sixth grade teacher's dinner table, which is pretty much all I have ever wanted to be.
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