Finding 35

8. Grade 6 and Mrs. Robar

I would think that every kid experiences some sort of turning point in elementary school.  When you reach grades 5 and 6, the kids start separating into cliques.  As much as we don’t want to admit it, it happens.  And kids start realizing how different they are from each other. 

Some kids are just cool, some are good at math, some are just a little weird, and others are bullies, or geeky, or artsy.  How a teacher manages all of these kids, I have no idea, but thinking back, I can see that in Grade 6, their personalities are starting to come to the foreground, and our grade 6 class was no different. 

The biggest bully in our school was definitely Mike Ross.  He lived down the street, and he was definitely a lost sort of kid.  I never knew his parents, or played with him really: he was bigger than the other kids and had red hair.  From the get go he always seemed to be in trouble, or trouble sought him out.  Nothing seemed to scare him.  And on the other side were the cool kids, especially the girls, Kitty and Tracey.  Kitty definitely had a following.  All the boys had a crush on her.  Tracey was cool, a bit of a tomboy, but she was just cool, as was Kitty.  They lived in the B section of Colby (all the streets started with the letter B), so I didn’t really see them that much.  There was Chris and Keith; I played hockey with them for years, and a lot of street hockey.  We always seemed to be on the same hockey teams.  There were a few really smart kids, Shawn MacDonald and a girl with red hair, Barbie, I think.  Funny thing about Barbie, she was in our school, then moved away, then showed up back at our high school as Barb this time, though she was sort of punk.  Then there were your average, normal, run of the mill kids, Christine, Lisa, and Leah.  I had a big crush on Leah; she had dark hair and lived up near the pool.  I have no idea what her last name is, but one day, she moved away.  Never to be heard from again.

I don’t have a lot of memories about kids in elementary school, but I do remember one project we had to do in Mrs. Robar’s grade six class.  We had to come up with some futuristic creation for art. I probably drew some sort of crappy hover car with poorly used colour pencils, and inconsistent scribbles, and everyone else had their dorky projects.  Everyone handed theirs in and they were shown around the class.  Then a quiet girl in our class, Stephanie, showed hers.  And it was simply incredible!  She had drawn this fantastic drawing of a new food-a complete meal in the shape of a pea.  You simply added water and VOILA!  A whole meal!  Her illustration was amazing, and you could see right away she was literally 10 years ahead of everyone else in the class.  The spray bottle she drew was complete with a label and ingredients, a real drawing.   I remember the shading on the spray bottle was fantastic.  She had a talent.  The rest of us were just grade 6 students.

There was another kid I knew up until Grade 3.  His name was Doug Walker, we played a lot of hockey and my aunt walked me over to his house all the time (my Aunt Lorna lived with us for a while).  Doug and I were best friends up until he moved to Ontario.  I have no idea what happened to him either.  Its like kids in elementary school can just disappear off the face of the earth one day.  They move and start a new life.