6. Second-Grade Lesson (cont.)

All went well—or as well as was possible under Miss Simpson’s stern gaze—until the day the boy sitting at the desk in front of me raised his hand and said, “Miss Simpson. Marion is carving her desk.”

I looked down at my hand, astonished. I was not carving! What I had, in fact, been doing was gently tracing with the tip of my pencil a carving that had already been there when I occupied the desk. But I was neither making fresh marks nor deepening the indentation in the wood.

Miss Simpson responded to the news like a bull to a red flag and charged down the aisle at me.

“Not in my room, you don’t!” she bellowed over my protestations of innocence. She took me by the arm and hauled me to the front of the room. At first I was certain she was going to use her strap on me. Most of the teachers in our school kept a strap in one of the bottom drawers of their desks and used it whenever they deemed necessary. Miss Christian, my first-grade teacher, was one of the few exceptions. She had a wooden pointer that she used both at the board and on us.

Miss Simpson, however, didn’t reach for the bottom drawer. Instead, she did something much worse. She reached for a note pad on her desk and wrote a note to Miss White. She was sending me to the principal!