My first grade teacher was Mrs. Repp. She was an older lady. The only thing I remember about her is that if she caught a bottom in the air she’d smack it. Usually this happened when someone was leaning across a desk to reach someone else’s desk. I think I even remember one day a fellow classmate giving her a swat for having a bottom in the air when she bent down to get something from a cupboard. The whole class was shocked and she was very mad.

I remember that the desks were arranged in groups of 4 or 5.  They weren’t really lined up, they were pushed together with no space in the middle so it was almost as if we had one big desk instead of a series of small ones.

My mother tells me that Mrs. Repp started writing really negative/mean things on my papers and that they became concerned. I know that in first grade I was diagnosed with dyslexia and my parents and others determined that I should repeat the first grade. They told me that I was taking first grade again because my hands weren’t as big as Mellissa’s. I can remember noticing that I was smaller than her one day as we got on the bus to go home. I know I had trouble with the orientation of letters and I had a letter and number line across my desk. I can remember struggling with knowing the orientation of 5 and S and I could never remember which side was my left and which was my right. At sometime during elementary school I figured out that if I tried to snap, my right hand was always the hand that would snap. I used this as my guide and whenever I had to determine left or right I’d think about snapping. Maybe this is weird, but I still use a similar strategy to tell left from right—it’s like my brain just can’t automatically remember which is side is left and which is right, I assume that’s the dyslexia.

Repeating first grade meant I new set of classmates and Angie and Melissa moved on without me. It was probably at that point that I became very lonely. I can remember walking around the playground by myself thinking how I wished my friend Erin from church went to school with me because then I would have a friend to play with on the playground.