letter to my favorite fifth grader preparing for the first day of school

                       every two or three years i reread mark twain's great saga from start to finish finding 
                       it as fresh as when i first read it. with the spirits of huck and jim pushing me i have 
                       been up and down the mississippi many times. though i travelled on big boats 
                       rather than intimately by raft i like to believe i've caught glimpses of them. it's certain 
                       they're still there behind some island or up some creek.

                                                                              -thomas hart benton

in just a few days you will begin your first day in fifth grade and i don't know how you're feeling about it, but i hope you're excited. i know fourth grade was sort of frustrating for you. maybe you felt restless and a little bit like what you wanted wasn't quite what everyone else wanted. and i got to thinking about my own fourth grade year and i suppose i know a little bit how you feel.

my grandma claimed she met him.

i hated fourth grade. not all of it. not the part where we learned the whole history of the state of missouri and went on a field trip to the state capitol building which was, and still is, full of paintings by thomas hart benton. they are huge murals covering whole walls and they can make you cry, they're so pretty and sad and full of life and suffering. and i loved all the books i read, but mostly i read them alone. all by myself, sneaky and secret-like. because my school just didn't seem all that interested in the whole learning thing. or reading. you can ask your mom. she didn't like things too much that year, either.

i would sit there in my fourth grade class, staring out the window or drawing in my notebook or secretly reading a book resting on my knees while our teacher would drone on about subtraction. in fourth grade! not fancy subtraction with fractions or decimals or negative numbers. just regular old subtraction that i learned way back in first grade. so i felt like it would be okay to occupy myself with other things. this did not suit my teacher at all. things got really frustrating when my teacher accused me of doing something i hadn't done and then took me outside into the hall while another teacher watched our class. she brought with us into the hall a wooden paddle and she paddled me with it. i didn't cry because i was just too sad to cry. i felt like that moment was confirmation i would never fit in there, would never figure out how to be the right sort of student for sitting in a desk in that room.

you can probably guess that your nanny had a fit when she found out a teacher paddled me at school. i don't think those school people were quite prepared for someone like your nanny, who is mostly kind and gentle but will get a little wild when her children get hit with a board. and although my teacher never did anything like that again, she never really taught me much and she certainly didn't make me feel welcome there in school. and i'm wondering if maybe fourth grade is just a tough year for some folks. maybe kids like you and like me are frustrated in fourth grade because we're already ready for something new, something different. fourth grade sure can feel like a straitjacket for some people. 

that brings me to fifth grade. i walked in the first day pretty nervous. we had just moved to town and i didn't know anyone. fifth grade was completely different. we had four teachers. four! and we went from room to room for our classes the way high school kids do. each room was full of wonderful things to explore- globes, maps, models and charts. i could not imagine even for a second needing to stare out the window or sneak a book into my lap. there was so much to see and so much to do and teachers seemed to want us all to see and do so much cool stuff.

let me tell you, fifth grade teachers are different. because they teach a single subject and they're really good at it, they have fun teaching. they will answer all sorts of interesting questions and if you ask a question your teacher doesn't know the answer to, she will say, "wow! that's a really awesome question but i'm not really sure how to answer it." and then she'll suggest you all go home and try to figure out the answer yourselves and report back the next day. probably she'll show up the next day with some sort of demonstration that answers your question, just in case nobody in your class could find out. you never know. but fifth grade teachers are joyous specialists. they love learning just as much as you do and they want everyone to love learning, too.

in history we made pemmican and in math we dove right into wild fractions with mixed numbers. and my science teacher brought in a cow's heart when we were studying the circulatory system. i looked at a drawing of a human heart in my science book and was amazed that the cow's heart was so similar. because we are both mammals. we have so much about us that's the same, although cows have way cooler digestive systems. fifth grade is when you really start seeing how things are connected and the whole world starts to make more sense. and it was awesome enough then that i can remember it thirty three years later. thirty three years!

the thing that surprised me most was how much we read in english class. out loud. silently. sometimes we wrote our own stories. i tended to write about misunderstood little girls who would one day be appreciated for the very things people hated about them at the moment (especially thier uncanny ability to be right most of the time). and i was surprised that many of the stories we read from real books in fifth grade were about just that. frustrated people, many of them the same age as the girls in my stories, the same age as me. the same age you are right this very minute. and they all had to struggle, had to go through some version of fourth grade or something even more awful, through something that made them doubt themselves and feel hopeless. but then each and every one of them found a way to speak up, step up, change things.

expect a lot from fifth grade. expect a lot from your teachers. it is their job and their passion to give you everything they have and good teachers will know that. you have already realized that you love to learn new things and so you need to expect a lot from your own self, as well. everything you've done in school so far has been preparation for this year. fifth grade is the year of great exploration so wear sturdy shoes and keep your eyes peeled. go out and take on the world! i will be right here waiting to hear all about it.