Retrospect: the window column

Self-tutoring about my school years: the tutor reflects on lost memory.

One year of my life I reflect on perhaps more than others is fifth grade.

I moved often as a kid because my father was in the military. Therefore, I never knew kids long-term the way most people do. Rather, I’d get to know some for two or three years, then we’d leave. Perhaps this figures importantly in the situation I’m describing.

My fifth grade class had six columns of five desks that faced the teacher and chalkboard at the front. I don’t think we had assigned seats, so how I ended up where I did I can’t recall. I was too new to have friends to sit near; I would develop friends as the year progressed, but had no close ones at the start.

In any case, I sat in column three from the hall side, and believe there were three more columns towards the window side. In case you’re wondering, my desk was fourth from the front; only one person sat behind me, who would become a very good friend as the year progressed.

From each of the first four columns from the hall side, I can recall a couple of people. (As I say: I sat in column three.) Yet, I can only recall one person who sat in column five, and no-one from six (which would have been the “window” seats).

Who was in column six – the window column – that I can’t remember at all? Furthermore, why can’t I recall them?

I’ve absorbed the idea, over the past fifteen years, that people are attracted to others like them, and at the same time prone to avoid others less so. (I’m sure that’s a famous idea, and didn’t originate with me — I’ve overheard it.) Therefore, I wonder if the people who sat by the window were simply so different from me that we never really met. Even at that age, we already had so little in common that, instinctively, we had no interest in each other — could such be true?

If I’d grown up in that town with all those kids, I’d have known them simply from happenstance, having been around them since preschool. Yet, I’d only arrived in that town a few months before grade five, so we didn’t share a reference frame beyond being in the same fifth grade classroom.

That school was a big, exciting place, rather like a small city: I was always aware that lots happened there every day of which I’d never know. Now I realize that perhaps, even in that classroom, such was true: there were kids who sat along the windows whose world was distinct from mine, to the point that I never gained awareness of them.

That kids so young could already be so disparate, I find surprising. You expect, at university or even in high school, to have classmates you’ll never really notice. Yet, in grade five?

Four decades later, I regret not having paid more attention to my surroundings back then.

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.