{"id":783,"date":"2015-01-12T00:56:21","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T00:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?page_id=783"},"modified":"2015-01-12T00:56:21","modified_gmt":"2015-01-12T00:56:21","slug":"life-in-area-c","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/true-life\/1975-1977\/life-in-area-c\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in Area C"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aside from starting to fantasizing about one of my teachers, the beautiful Ms. McCormick, life in Grade 5 was relatively uneventful.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had begun to notice the girls around me more than before. They were each pretty and confusing to me in their own way. I had started to wonder if I looked okay, or if my clothes were as good as everyone else’s. I had become self-conscious. All the people around me were mysterious in one way or another. Maybe my curiosity was piqued by having all these people running around Area C all the time. Maybe I just felt a bit bewildered and uneasy in large groups of people.<\/p>\n

\"MacCorkindale_Grade_6_Class_LO\"Dr. H. N. MacCorkindale elementary school was designed with an open-area concept, where Grades K through 7 are grouped in different “Areas”: Area A, Area B, Area C, and Area D. Each Area contained two grades, and usually three sections of the area were arranged in a classroom layout, and a fourth section contained low, multi-purpose tables and stools, which were useful for science or art\/craft projects.<\/p>\n

When I started at “Corky” (as some people called it), I was in Grade 5, in Area C. Kim was in Grade 3 in Area B, which was across the hall.<\/p>\n

\n

One day in class, a kid sitting behind me asked to borrow a pencil. I turned around and saw this huge guy smiling at me, squeezed into his impossibly small desk. He said his name was Vince and I introduced myself. Turning around to my desk again, I hid my hands while I tore up tiny pieces of paper and pushed them in-between my fingers. I turned around to Vince again, waved my hands and snowed a little shower of paper bits over his desk. He laughed at my little magic trick and called me “John John the Leprechaun”. I knew we were friends from that point on.<\/p>\n

Vince was a big kid – in fact, probably the biggest kid in the whole school. I didn’t see him around many other people, so I figured he was new to our school and, like me, perhaps a bit shy or a bit of a loner.<\/p>\n

School puts people of all kinds of different classes, races and upbringings together whether they want to be or not. I was never really that good at socializing or playing in groups, however much I really wanted to. Maybe I was just too much of a loner or a voyeur, and enjoyed watching others from a safe distance. But hanging around with Vince made me feel safer around the bigger kids.<\/p>\n

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Aside from starting to fantasizing about one of my teachers, the beautiful Ms. McCormick, life in Grade 5 was relatively uneventful. I had begun to notice the girls around me more than before. They were each pretty and confusing to me in their own way. I had started to wonder if I looked okay, or … Continue reading Life in Area C<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":326,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-783","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/783\/revisions\/784"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}