Long Ago (1972): A Little Lisper

Kindergarten Progress Report July 1972 (typo on report?)

Scanning down the typed progress report I am puzzled by the date. It says July 1971 and appears to be a checklist reporting on both mid-term and June Kindergarten progress. 1971 can't be right. I had just turned 5 in the summer of '71 and our school system did not have a Jr. Kindergarten program. The Catholic school up the road had one. My best friend went there. It was a funny thing to recall, but I remember I thought it was odd that she started school a whole year before I did. It is a typo or perhaps the teacher created this form in July of 71 and redistributed them the following year. I even go back and check the dates on the winter report card.
For the briefest of moments I wonder about the possibility that I failed Kindergarten and my parents covered it up. I feel like Doug Heffernan in the episode of "King of Queen's" where his parents reveal the truth to him about his year in "Super Kindergarten." Mom assures me that this was not the case. In fact, she asserts that it was quite the opposite.
Apparently there was talk about accelerating me two grades. The school had proposed that I return as a grade 3 student in the Fall. She tells me she did not want me skipped ahead because this had happened to her as a child. By the time she got to High school, she was still a little girl playing with dolls and was not at the same level of maturity as many of her classmates. She graduated and entered the working world at 15. She did not want the same for me.
I find this hard to believe. The checklist does not hint at this. It doesn't jump out at me as being exemplary in any regard. I am still reeling with the news of my messy writing with incorrect form and inattention to colouring comment from my winter report.
My mother's credibility as an accurate historian comes into question. She once went on record stating, "I wouldn't want you to get too thin" as I yet again joined Weight Watchers in my annual quest to lose 10, 30, 60, or 100 lbs. I am the person who sits in her doctor's office and tries to read my chart over his shoulder during a physical. I live in fear that beside weight he will write, "morbidly obese." So, mom's view and mine are simply not the same. Little white lies. Designed to make us feel better, but we never fully trust the word of the flatterer again.
I let little details bother me. I've been told that I "read into things too much." Just look at the time I've spent ruminating about one little date. Being accurate though with the dates, times, and settings of my own history helps me to recover memories within the context to which they belong.
Looking over this checklist, one criterion jumps right out at me. It reads "Speaks clearly and effectively" and my teacher has written "speech correction" in one term and checked it off as a "Yes" in the June column. I hadn't thought about my speech teacher in many, many years. This is the only documentation I have that reminds me of her existence during my school days.
My memory of her comes from grade one. I wonder if I regressed in my speech over that summer of '72.
It is clearly in the doorway of my grade one classroom that I am standing. It is beside my old Kindergarten classroom but further up the hallway and looks almost directly across to that mysterious room where the teachers go at recess. It is my pretty grade one teacher that I see. In my memory she always wears a blue and white checked mini dress, with her long blonde hair cascading down her back. Of course, this is what she is wearing in our class picture and I use this reference for my memory of her. She is tall and when she smiles at me her cornflower eyes wrinkle up at the edges and I know that she likes me.
I am frightened to be called to the door. I am not the type of student who is called out of class. Children sent to the door, or worse, out to the hallway, are known as "disturbances." Naughty children who are made to face the wall. Some are compliant and others jump up to make faces at us through the glass window cut into the door. Until now, the naughty children have all been boys. I can't imagine what I may have done to be called to the door.
It is unexpected and no one has prepared me for this visit from a stranger. She appears pleasant enough, but I am suspicious. She has hair like my mom's, only brown, not quite a beehive, but that weekly wash and set at the beauty parlor, that even when teased out with a comb you can still see where the roller made its little sausage look. She wears a blush pink sweater set with a cameo brooch. She must be very old. She wants to take me to a different room to do some work.
My heart feels heavy because for the first time I have a sense that there is something wrong with me. While I was naively ignorant of my messy writing and left-handedness the year before, this was proof that something significant was definitely wrong with me. But what was it?
It wasn't work with a pencil. I didn't have to read from books or flashcards. I was made to speak my ABC's and hold my mouth in funny shapes. I repeated sounds over and over again. We played little games where I recited little chants and rhymes.
I had a "speech impediment." I was a lisper. A lisper! How had I not known? It was significant enough that intervention was required. I don't recall anyone ever correcting my speech or making fun of me. I have an older brother... you'd have to think this would be just prime torture material. Oblivious, completely oblivious.
I had many, many sessions with the speech teacher. She was one of the loveliest teachers that I will ever know. The sessions came to include a few other students. We played games and won little rewards. Even though I enjoyed these sessions, I took them very seriously. "Thammy thnake thlid through the thlippery glath." I chanted so hard that Sammy imprited right into my brain.
I was unhappy with the knowledge that something about me was different. Being called to a doorway, out to the hallway, to a round table in a resource room, were easy symbols to interpret. This difference in me, this impediment, this defecit, would serve to physically separate me from the rest of my class. How I hated that.
I practiced every sound, I watched myself in the mirror as I forced my tongue to lay still - willing those "th's" to turn into "s's". I hissed like a cat as I played in the backyard. I read out loud to my mom each night. My early love for oral storytelling became therapeutic. I loved to pretend to be my teacher, the beautiful one with the cornflower eyes, and read little stories to my dolls and stuffed animals all lined up on my bed turned classroom.
Eventually "Thammy thnake" became "Sammy snake" and my sessions came to an end. I'm not sure how long I was in speech therapy, but I've hardly thought back on this time in my life. I am very grateful now that I received timely intervention and that my speech was not permanently altered, but I don't wan't to be reminded of my different-ness. I think about the students I have had over the years. How must they have felt about being "pulled out" of the classroom to work with the Learning Resource Teacher or the English Language Itinerant Teacher? I imagine even when we started "pulling in" it made little difference. These additional teachers signify a "need" of some kind don't they? Kids pick up on these environmental changes pretty quickly. I think now of one little boy who despite significant challenges with motor skills, refused the use of assistive technology in the classroom. He let his Alpha Smart board collect dust and chose to suffer through the laborious task of handwriting so that he would not appear to be any different from his peers. And a very big part of my 6 year old heart identified with that.