Spelling has never come easy for me, but that is no excuse. At the end of the 2nd grade year, I had a typical spelling test. You remember the type, Monday pretest, Wednesday practice test, and my favorite Friday the final test. I studied for these tests with the help of my mother,a third grade teacher. Monday night, after the pretest, I wrote each word I missed ten times. There was always twenty words on the test, since I missed every word, I wrote two-hundred words. Wednesday night, after the practice test I again wrote each word that I missed ten times, since I again missed every word, I wrote a total of two-hundred words. With all that writing you would think my handwriting would at least be better, but it is worse then my spelling. Friday night, after the final test, after again missing twenty words, I did not have to write any more words.
By the end of 2nd grade I had not only failed every Friday final test, I had not yet gotten one word correct, not one word! At this point I had no concern of passing a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday spelling test, I only wanted to get one word right, just one word.
It was April or May the afternoon sun filtered through the windows. The teacher slowly walked up and down between the aisles making sure we where ready for the Friday final test. The room was silent except for a few nervous doodlers to my right. My head was already sunk. I was prepared to once again feel that heavy weight of disappointment, my stomach had that slight ache, as I again prepared to do my best on something that I knew would turn out embarrassing.As I looked over and saw the girls who got all twenty words right on the Monday pretest or the Wednesday practice test eating Popsicles, I was thinking how I would have to hide my score from my friends and my parents, and I was just hoping that the teacher would not read the scores a loud again. She walked past my desk checking that my pencil was sharpened, and my paper was clean. It was. I listened to her feet clunk across the floor to the front of room to begin reading the test.
As the teacher went through the words, my head sank lower and lower. I spelled word after word, I would even spell them three different ways and circle the one I thought looked right. She was on word fifteen. Math. "We will have math after spelling." I wrote down M and then I woke up. It most have been the straightest I ever sat in my desk during a spelling test. I began to smile. For the first time in my life I had the chance to get a word right on the Friday final spelling test. I gripped my pencil a little tighter. I hunched over my desk getting my chest close to my paper. I peered down to look at my math book. There it was just laying there a capital M staring me in the face. I did not think of it as cheating. It was coping. It was surviving. I slowly swung my body in my desk to hide my eyes from the teacher. I quickly glanced down and grabbed with my mind one letter at a time. I swiped my forearm against my brow, sweat glistened off my arm. Finally I was done. I looked over the word; it did not look right, but in my experience that did not mean much. I looked up at the teacher, as she said, "number 19 clock." Number 19 I missed three words. No problem, I thought; I had the words memorized in the right order, I just could not spell them right. I quickly scribbled down the words I knew to be numbers 16, 17 and 18, and finished the test with the rest of the class.
I turned in the test beaming. We got the test returned by the end of the day. Mercifully she did not say the scores aloud. She turned the test upside down on my desk. I quickly turned it over. On top of the page in round, bubble numbers was a - 20, (she stopped putting an F on my paper months ago.) I could not believe it. I scanned down the page to number 15 and saw a giant red slash next to the word MATHEMATICS.