“School Daze” by Chad Robert Parker

My family moved when I was five years old and I transferred schools in the middle of Kindergarten. The second program focused on the phonetic alphabet and the first program focused on whatever the opposite of that is called. I learned the letters in the first school, but the second school wanted to focus on the sounds. Confused? I was.

My new Kindergarten teacher would put me in a chair everyday and then place headphones on my ears. I had never interacted with a computer quite like that before. It didn’t register at first that I was supposed to be following along and writing something on a page rather than waiting for the audio story to begin.

First, the voice gave me an instruction to write my name at the top of the page. I was curious to see where this was going. Then it proceeded to instruction number two, three, and four about the sounds of letters. By this point I was yawning and my teacher would come by and wonder why I hadn’t completed the first step. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no dummy. I may not have known very many of the other answers even if I had tried, but I knew how to put my name on the page. I just didn’t see the point in it.

Why do a boring assignment when not doing it would result in me being sent to the coloring table every day.

I spent my Kindergarten class time becoming an artist.

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