Anneke.Net > Education > Elementary & Middle School

When I first started school, I went to preschool and then first grade at St. Andrews Episcopal Academy. I recall very little about this school, except for the navy blue school uniforms with white patches displaying the school emblem, and a very faint memory of someone trying to teach us a few words of a foreign language- French or Spanish, I believe.

However, after first grade my family left North Carolina and left for Germany, settling down in Boeblingen, (West) Germany. Because I had only picked up a very little bit of german from the lessons we took for a couple of months before leaving, and I would be entering a German elementary school, they decided to put me in first grade again for the first half of the year, as a first grader's vocabulary is less advanced than a second grader, and I might learn more quickly. Halfway through the year I switched to the second grade class. I have perhaps a select handful of memories from that year in a german school: Grosse and Kleine Pause (big and small breaks, or recesses), when we got to play; the bathrooms, which were only accessible by leaving the school to go around to the front of the building, where they were; the day I forgot the english word for "Star," and could only remember the german "Stern"; the girl with no arms (only hands, attached at the shoulders) who was pushed down the stairs and cut her head; and finally, the day my german teacher yelled at me for not drawing the lily-of-the-valley flower the way I was told to, even after my second try.

(More to follow later.)