9X2=F.U., Mrs. Jayo

When I was in the third grade, the school I went to had three portables (outside trailer-type buildings), one for each of the third-grade classrooms. All of the students had a homeroom teacher, but in an unprecedented experimental program, during the afternoons, each student went to a teacher that specialized in a different difficulty level of a certain subject--math, reading, and social studies.

This program was initially designed to put the accelerated students with like-minded students and the dumb kids with the dumb kids. This was the same year that someone at school sent a letter home to my mother, who was normally a single-parent but was cohabitating with the Clover Club chip guy, Scott Clairborne. The letter indicated school officials wanted to test my IQ for special classes. My mother agreed, and I remember the day I was tested, walking from my classroom, the cubicle on the far left, to the south, across the blacktop, to an identical cream colored building with a brown roof, and a gray sand-paper textured ramp leading up to it. Of the questions I was asked that day, I remember these: How many days are in a year?; How many weeks are in a year?; and How many feet are in a yard? As I remember, I passed with flying colors, and the woman testing me (the school counselor?) seemed impressed while I indignantly answered the questions, as they seemed like such silly ones.

In the three afternoon classes, reading, math, and social studies, I was in the advanced group for both reading and social studies. The reading teacher Mrs. Ware was a rolly-polly woman with a bad perm, and I remember the books we read were part of a series of anthologies called the Junior Reader series--my books, the smart kid books, were yellow with blue writing and borders. Within the pages were greats like Roald Dahl. I remember getting so excited about the reading that in private I squeezed the books between my fingers, feeling their thickness, and I would release a little pent up squeal of delight.

I don't remember the social studies teacher's name, but I think her first name was Susan. She had a short hair cut, was in her fifties, had big glasses, and big teeth that shined from being covered in too much saliva. She had a mouth full of dental work--partials and bridges or maybe it was a set of adult braces. I remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall in class in 1989 on the old TV atop the metal rolling TV cart while in social studies. While at the time I understood the significance of the event as all major historical events were aired on the TV (I watched the Challenger explosion at the age of four what seems to me like 700 times), I was too young to understand the importance or implications of what was going on in the world. I just thought there were a bunch of angry people wandering around with sledgehammers and pickaxes taking out their frustrations on a wall--which in a sense is exactly what was happening.

When it came to math, however, I was a dumb kid. And in some ways, I am still the dumb kid when it comes to math. Mrs. Jayo was the math teacher; she was also my homeroom teacher. She was by far the youngest and most attractive of the three teachers. She was petite with chin-length curly blond hair. Her face escapes me now, although in my mind's eye, her features are taking on the facial features of Amy Sedaris, though I know this wasn't what she really looked like.

Mrs. Jayo didn't seem to have the patience for me, and while I don't know if I would recognize her if I saw her again, I would like to tell her that she may be the root of all my math ills.

I remember the day as a dreary one, cold, dark, cloudy, and maybe damp. As a reward for memorizing our times tables, at lunch time, there was an ice cream social. The problem being, I didn't memorize mine. So, Mrs. Jayo made me go outside alone, while the others celebrated with their ice cream and toppings. Even Sary Anderson, the strange girl who owned rats and kept them in a bathtub, who I later became friends with, and in adult life ended up on Judge Judy in an embroiled battle of defamation with her punk rock boyfriend when he put her picture on a flyer with the word slut next to it, got to go to the ice cream social. This has always seemed a great injustice to me--something in my brain made me smarter than the rest of the kids, so much so that I was deemed gifted; yet, that same brain couldn't figure out numbers. That day was the first day in my life when I felt weird and left out, the only kid on the playground, ostricized. Maybe Mrs. Jayo thought I was already too pudgy, I didn't need any more ice cream, my little chubby cheeks and miniature fat roll indicating I had had enough ice cream already.

I learned my times tables though--no thanks to Mrs. Jayo or the experimental system that segregated the dumb kids from the smart ones, putting them in incestuous little pissing-contest boxes. I learned my times tables at a different school, one that's torn down now. I learned them from Mrs. Sutherland, the butterfly lady of Idaho. I don't know how she helped me or how I learned, but I remember piles and piles of worksheets, and going over the numbers again and again. Maybe Mrs. Sutherland was more patient or she saw a part of herself in me, a woman so eccentric that she devoted her life to insects. I do know that when I finally conquered the times tables, I was up at the chalkboard participating in a competition against other students in front of the class--the prize, hard candy--and when I beat everyone by completing them first and correctly I was elated and shocked. But there was another feeling, too. One that would best be described as "Fuck you, Mrs. Jayo."