Page 48 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade7_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 1.5
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2 My new school was Public School 43 on 128th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, across from the Transit Authority bus terminal. Mrs. Conway was my teacher, and it took me one day to get into trouble with her.
3 In the elementary grades I attended, reading was taught by having kids stand up one at a time and read aloud. Mrs. Conway had us up and reading as soon as the readers had been handed out. When it came to be my turn, I was anxious to show my skills. I read quickly, and there was a chorus of laughter in response. They were laughing at my speech.
4 “Slow down and try it again,” Mrs. Conway said.
5 I slowed my speech down and started reading from the top of the page. Johnny
Brown started laughing immediately. Johnny always had something to say to make the class laugh. I threw the book sidearm and watched it hit his desk and bounce across the room.
6 “Don’t you dare throw a book in my classroom!” Mrs. Conway, red-faced, screamed. “Into the closet! Into the closet!”
7 I had to stand in the closet for the rest of the morning. That afternoon
Mrs. Conway divided the class into reading groups. I was put into the slowest group. I stayed there until the next week, when the whole class was given a spelling test and I scored the highest grade. Mrs. Conway asked me to read in front of the class again.
8 I looked at Johnny Brown as I headed for the front of the class. He had this glint in his eye, and I knew he was going to laugh. I opened my mouth, and he
put his hand across his mouth to hold his laugh in. I went across to where he sat and hit him right on the back of the hand he held over his mouth. I was sent to the principal’s office and had to stay after school and wash blackboards. Later in the year it would be Johnny Brown who would be in Mrs. Conway’s doghouse for not doing his homework, with her screaming at him that he couldn’t be a comedian all his life. He went on to become a television comedian and is still doing well.
9 Being good in class was not easy for me. I had a need to fill up all the spaces in my life, with activity, with talking, sometimes with purely imagined scenarios that would dance through my mind, occupying me while some other student was at the blackboard. I did want to get good marks in school, but they were never of major importance to me, except in the sense of “winning” the best grade in a subject.
My filling up the spaces, however, kept me in trouble. I would blurt out answers to Mrs. Conway’s questions even when I was told to keep quiet, or I might roll a marble across my desk if she was on the other side of the room.
10 The other thing that got me in trouble was my speech. I couldn’t hear that I was speaking badly, and I wasn’t sure that the other kids did, but I knew they often laughed when it was my turn to speak. After a while I would tense up anytime Mrs. Conway called on me. I threw my books across that classroom enough times for Mrs. Conway to stop my reading once and for all.
11 But when the class was given the assignment to write a poem, she did read mine. She said that she liked it very much.
12 “I don’t think he wrote that poem,” Sidney Aronofsky volunteered.
13 I gave Sidney Aronofsky the biggest punch he ever had in the back of his big
head and was sent to the closet. After the incident with Sidney, Mrs. Conway said that she had had quite enough of me and that I would not be allowed to participate
My Notes
Unit 1 • The Choices We Make 21
glint: a spark of light
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