Rubbing Mrs. Kalberg's Humps
And other things I did in fourth graders.
Friends, I have a confession: This post is from the archives. But way back in the archives when—get this— I had 58 subscribers. If you were one of those 58 subscribers I NEED TO KNOW. Bless you! You’re still here! But it’s a safe bet, the majority of you have never seen this one.
I’m reposting it for two reasons:
My dad is visiting and when I should be writing, I’m making him drive to the next town over to look at some used Room and Board bar stools I’m thinking about buying from a Facebook marketplace seller. I ain’t getting murdered alone!
You’ll like it! I think. Also I gave it a little edit. My GIF game sucked back then and I barely dropped any F-bombs so I liberally added a few for more flavor.
Enjoy!
As my son winds down the school year and bids adieu to fourth grade, I’m feeling introspective and nostalgic. Fourth grade was the beginning of my most formative scholastic memories: Kickball, the Bookmobile, and drinking High-C out of the waxy interior of Dixie cups. It was also where my intense and burning hatred of long division and reducing fractions was seeded.
I often think how different our elementary school experiences are as old people are wont to do. It seemed easier back in my day even though I literally walked a mile uphill and downhill in a snowstorm.
There was no social media, GPS, tiger parents. We learned multiplication tables by repeatedly listening to a record (an actual piece of vinyl!) in the classroom. I remember the guy who sang the 8’s table. It was a pirate theme and I LOVED how excited he got about eight times eight being SIXTY-FOUR MOTHERFUCKER1! We memorized that shit the way the good lord intended. There was no work to show. There was no rationale or reasoning to defend. Six times four was twenty-four. I can’t explain why. It just was.
My son loved fourth grade, but that little Gen Alpha will never understand how great it was for us Gen X’ers.
Gen X Kindergarten: It was roughly three hours a day and a good chunk of that was spent napping. You graduated with a rudimentary understanding of the ABC’s and a plant you grew from a seed. You wore your dad’s old Montgomery Ward work shirt as an art smock to protect the clothes you assembled by matching the animal on the top to the animal on the bottom.
Gen Alpha Kindergarten: Enjoy your full day of learning, suckers, and please know not one part of that will be spent napping. Five and six year-old’s leave school able to write sentences with at least three words, read the same books I read as a fifth grader, count to 1,000, analyze a profit and loss statement, tell time, and list ten latin root words.
Gen X First Grade: This was the year us Gen X’ers got hooked on phonics. We were all about the Berenstain Bears going to the doctor and Ramona Quimby being a pest, and a naughty, bipedal cat in an obnoxious top hat who wreaked havoc on the home of two latchkey children. Flash cards were introduced to aid in the memorization of simple math equations.
First grade was also when we honed our fine motor skills with the World’s Greatest Game, Mum Ball. You got to sit on your desk, a rare treat in itself, and take turns pelting a big, red ball at your classmates' faces until they either dropped it or used their voice to ask for the school nurse. The goal was to be the last one sitting in silence. (It wasn’t until years later I realized Mum Ball wasn’t a game for us. It was a clever diversionary tactic for teachers to get twenty minutes of quiet.)
Gen Alpha First Grade: Math for the Alphas is 98.4% word problems (and I needed a first grader to come up with that percentage.) They are also required to defend a thesis, identify weather conditions, and learn how to source and parse data and create a UML diagram before moving on to grade two.
Gen X Second Grade: Second grade was when things started getting real. It was nine months of hard knocks, man. The Grade 2’s could smell weakness like it was pizza day in the cafeteria. Lines were drawn. Cliques were forming. Marriage proposals were bandied about. I’m half Italian and half Lebanese and nothing advertised that better than my hairy gruesome arms as they were referred to in certain circles. One might call it a gorilla fur pelt. In fact, one did: Danny DeCorte. Thank goodness we didn’t have social media. Oh wait! We did! Only it wasn’t online-- it was written in childish scrawl in a bathroom stall.
When not dying of embarrassment, we were attached to our Atari consoles playing games like Donkey Kong or Pitfall, watching Betamax recordings of All My Children, reading Garfield comics on the microfiche in the school library, or sweating through seasonally-inappropriate long sleeve shirts.
Gen Alpha Second Grade: Today’s second graders have a full understanding of the systematic relationship between all number facts, can diagram a sentence, write dissertations on the appropriateness of a side hug, and accurately forecast the weather for the next six days.
Gen X Third Grade: Third grade for the Gen X’ers was so rife with political headlines, even Atari obsessed eight year-olds couldn’t ignore them. The eruption of Mount St. Helens, the assassination of John Lennon, the invention of the Walkman! Lunchtime conversations ranged from who would Tara McMahnus punch after school to who would free the hostages in Iran?
Perhaps as a means to ease the tensions of current events, crank phone calls were all the rage and without caller ID or *69 we had no choice but to stay on the line and absorb the insults in hopes of identifying the caller the old fashioned way—by their voice. Ideally the string of put downs didn’t take too long because GOD FORBID your aunt was calling and got a busy signal!
If you weren’t receiving a crank call, you were probably placing one, calling randos from the White Pages and asking if there was a John in the house (No? Then where do you go to the bathroom???) or trying to order twenty pizzas to your crush’s house. Thank goodness for Judy Blume who introduced me to Margaret, Tony, and Linda who had it so much worse than I did.
Gen Alpha Third Grade: In grade three, students learn how to identify the blood types of their classmates, build their personal websites, and predict the annual snowfall for the next seven years within 0.0039% accuracy.
Gen X Fourth Grade: One day my mom came to school, marched straight to my classroom, asked for Tara McManus, and proceeded to take her out the hallway and berate her for allegedly crank calling our house. A sobbing Tara returned to her desk and Mrs. Kalberg went right on with our science lesson. It was an age when you could be disciplined by any one over the age of eighteen. Other parents grounded you, strangers broke up fist fights by pulling kids off each other and throwing them on the pavement, and store clerks called us names.
Mrs. Kalberg had scoliosis and underneath her chic black turtlenecks rose a magnificent hump. Sometimes during silent reading or math practice, she would call upon her favorite students to come to her desk and massage that mighty protrusion. You bet I was a favorite. Probably wasn’t great for my Pac-Mac induced trigger thumb or my math skills, but damn it felt good to be kneaded.
Gen Alpha Fourth Grade: By the end of their school year, today’s fourth graders must have completed at least two novels in two different genres and be actively querying agents for representation. They must also have published between 3-5 apps with an average rating of 4.5 stars or higher.
Gen X Fifth Grade: One morning over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, my dad looked up and asked “What smells?” He knew damn well what smelled! It was me. Smelly Shelly and her overstimulated sweat glands. My body betrayed me in fifth grade. BO, a massive growth spurt cascading me several inches over every boy in the school and some teachers, and a no longer flat chest. But I refused to wear a bra and not in a cool, I dissent, feminist sort of way. I simply was not interested in the female rites of passage my girlfriends were so eager to partake in. I was much more comfortable in my brother’s oversized Benetton rugby shirts. My mom compromised by forcing me into a camisole and I’ll never forget the creepy feeling of Jason Murdoch’s index finger tracing the outline of the straps when he stood behind me in line for our bi-yearly lice checks. I elbowed him in the ribs and it felt so damn good, my chest swelled with power, but I quickly tamped it down lest any other creepers take notice. If I had a bra, I would have burned it right there and let the smoldering nylon singe his New Balance 990’s.
Judy Blume gave way to Jackie Collins and while I didn’t understand 90% of the references, the bra thing started making a whole lot more sense.
Gen Alpha Fifth Grade: These kids will spend three nights at a science camp 150 miles from home where they learn how to remove and replace their own appendix, survive off plant sweat collected from a plastic bag, and explain the concept of reality as it relates to the physics of the sky- in French.
The more things change the more they really change. School for us Gen X’ers was a lot different than it is for our kids. I’d love to stay and reminisce, but I’ve got a kindergartener coming over to rewire my circuit breaker.
XO,
Shelly
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This brings back sooooo many elementary school memories!! Our principal had a paddle for discipline, we had so many recesses (no matter the weather) I don’t know how any teaching was done, we could bring HOMEMADE treats to our classroom, detention was spent with our heads facedown on the table to “think about what we’ve done,” my 4th grade teacher threw the chalkboard eraser at students if they were talking (or slap his yardstick on their table), and ohhhhh so much more!! Thank you for this Shelly!!
Greatly enjoyed this blast from the past! Here in Germany, our kids’ kindergarten is still practicing the Gen X methods. No reading, no math. Just a lot of playing. I’m a fan.
Also…Im sure there are a million Jefferson Elementaries, but would the one in the picture be in Maplewood, NJ?