#670 Ben Jones began at Byram his second grade year, in the fall of 73. A fairly typical youth, he was an okay fellow, made average grades and was present at Byram for almost a decade, leaving about 81 or so. Ben was in second grade with me, in Miss Gustavis homeroom. We ventured forth to Rookers room and another woman named Crimm who was nothing exciting to either look at or listen to, her teaching at Byram for that one glorious year. We ventured the tedious routine of spelling words and writing for that good year. Somewhere along here, it was also important we learn about synonyms and homonyms. And there was no attempt to convince us of the importance of knowing this, was there? To a 7-yr-old as we were, greater excitement along this level was found in rhyming words. Replace the first letter with another letter and get a new word. Could we not have enjoyed such behavior more? House, mouse. Live, give. How Dr. Suess it all was for us. Assignments could follow these borders of rhyming words or replacing words or even letters. Such was this particular assignment. We were to take the word WORK and replace a letter to make a new word. BUT not the FIRST letter, bringing forth a rhyming word, such as we were used to. Oh, no. Now we would replace the LAST letter, creating a new word. How underhandedly tricky! Ben failed at grasping this. Instead of dropping the last letter and changing it with D and M to make a new word, Ben in fact came up with DORK and MORK (nano-nano?). Of course, Ben was really ahead of himself with high school class distinctions and sitcom titles, and not focusing on the mundane of mere words and earthworms, but that day, he received no recognition. Ben would delight later on in pointing out the character, Cooter, on Dukes of Hazard, was really named Ben Jones.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 21:36:07 +0000
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