I do recall that every day after lunch, we pulled out our composition books, and the teacher, a tense, unhappy woman, sat at her desk dictating numbers in sequence. We translated them into Roman numerals and wrote them down in columns. CLXXXIV, CLXXXV, CLXXXVI, CLXXXVII, CLXXXVIII, CLXIX. We had to think and write fast to keep up. “Can’t you slow down?” we objected. Our teacher ignored us. On and on she droned, her thoughts elsewhere. Bored, lulled into drowsiness by her monotonous voice, most of us fell behind, skipped, and dropped out, only to begin again after lunch the next day. “Beverly comes home from school exhausted,” Mother told the neighbors. Miss Sampson, in 5B, was another teacher who wore navy blue and chalk dust and seemed old. She was kind but uninteresting. She gave us one homework assignment, the construction of a paper box the correct size to hold one gallon. Mine was wrong. Johnny, the boy from Gregory Heights, now sat across the aisle from me. The class had decided, and I did not discourage them, that Johnny and I were in love.
