A Decade of Daughter Number Three

Today is Daughter Number Three's 10th birthday (3,770 posts so far!), and I finally get to use my favorite school picture:


Fall 1969, 5th grade. I loved that dress.

The New York Mets won the World Series that October, the My Lai massacre was exposed soon after, and we were all watching Dark Shadows on television after school. I learned the Roman numerals, how much a million is, and the fact that our numbers are set up in base 10 (a fact that challenged the very foundations of my worldview). We dropped eggs, packaged in various ways to protect them, off the roof of the school to understand physics and shot Estes rockets into the sky.

This was the last year I had a single teacher in a single room, since we switched to a middle school format for 6th grade. And what a piece of work he was. I credit him with driving me to the anti-authoritarian stance I've held ever since. (Coincidentally, the Black Panthers were being routed or killed by the FBI, students were shot to death at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, and the U.S. invaded Cambodia, all in the same school year. So maybe he wasn't the only reason.)

My report card declared I was average or worse in social studies and average in arithmetic, science, and health. My favorite report card item: for all four quarters, I got a "needs improvement" mark for my ability to "understand and apply basic facts and concepts."

Ah, well. I was only absent 10 days that year, 9 of them in the first quarter, so at least I was healthy.

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Past anniversary posts, each with age-appropriate photographic evidence:

• First
• Second
• Third
• Fourth 
• Fifth 
• Sixth 
• Seventh
• Eighth 
• Ninth