I presently work in an office and also travel around telling Adirondack stories. As a third grader I never imagined I would be doing jobs such as these.
They were not among the list of things I could do when I grew up that were outlined in the book I got from the bookmobile way back when.
The book stated, “One day, you can be a teacher, factory worker, or astronaut! You can be a fireman, doctor, or traffic cop!”
The writer didn’t say anything about strategy consultants, event planning coordinators, or examining business partners working on special projects.
It didn’t explain how to work with government agencies or special interest groups.
And it certainly didn’t prepare me for doing my own taxes.
Life gets tricky, and sometimes our day jobs in the Adirondacks feel so far away from everything we learned when we were young.
But there’s something so sweet about the things we learned in third grade—how these things shaped our world and got us started on the same page.
Back then it all started when we all knew the same things.
Many of these things made me crazy with how cool they were.
Others I just found to be plain silly. In third grade I learned cursive writing, the types of rocks (I was already pretty good at drawing rocks), how to brush my teeth by using those pink chew tablets to show off the missed spots, the planets, the continents and oceans, the states, addition and subtraction, types of triangles, and composing an essay.
Third grade was a big deal. It was the start to get us going into any possible thing.
But inside of all this huge pile of where we are in the world and what is it made of, we were taught good handwriting skills, how to show all our work, and not to shoot spit wads from the bendy straws we got with our milk at lunchtime.
As I sat in the little Inlet school house, I was not yet thinking about what I would do when I grew up.
I just stared out the window trying to avoid a spelling test while the last March storm raged snowflakes the size of nickels.
We had learned about money and how to make change, so I used my knowledge to imagine how many millions were blowing around if each snowflake was actually a nickel. With 20 nickels to the dollar, that would be…I raised my hand.
Our teacher Mrs. deCamp motioned to me to put my hand down and threw me the “get back to the test” frown.
Obviously she knew I was going to ask a question, or give an answer to a question, unrelated to our spelling test that would throw the entire class out of whack.
So I fumbled with my spitwad shooter and tried to spell the next word.
“Clothes,” she announced. “These clothes were my brother’s hand-me-downs, but were in good shape,” she said in her “good teacher” voice.
Learning the “teacher voice” was something else I learned in third grade.
—
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller, lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com