Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Everything I need to know I learned at Falls Valley

Blame it on my pending graduation, but I've waxed a bit philosophical about my education lately. Mostly, I've remembered Falls Valley Elementary School and the priceless lessons I learned as a little girl.

Last week, I was in the testing center painstakingly filling out my Scantron sheet. I always fill out the bubbles with obnoxious precision — I can't bring myself to mark them with light dots, and I find it equally annoying whether I go outside the line or fail to fill the entire circle. Why do I do that?


And then, I remembered. A long-stored memory pushed its way to the front of my mind with all the speed I wished the answers to my test questions could muster. I remembered sitting in Mrs. Holcomb's second grade classroom — the one that opened up to the coat room and also Mrs. Pickett's classroom on the south side. Mrs. Holcomb always had the date written on the board in numbers/dashes form (you know, 3-16-10), and I would always write "95" at the end of the date. I couldn't wait to be in 96. I thought the number 5 looked fat.

But the thing I remembered at that  moment in the testing center had nothing to do with fat numbers or coat rooms. I remembered Mrs. Holcomb teaching us how to fill out bubble sheets for our big Iowa Basics test.

She put three bad examples on the board. In one, the circle was filled, but too light. In the next, the circle was filled, but the mark spilled over the edge. The last showed a bubble incompletely filled, and Mrs. Holcomb explained that the computer might not read these marks properly. I decided right then  to never miss a question on a test like this because of something as silly as inappropriately filled Scantron bubbles.

So there I was, 15 years later, in the testing center at BYU-Idaho one month prior to receiving my bachelor's degree, and I was filling in the bubbles with ridiculously diligent accuracy. I'm sure I learned a lot of other things in my second grade class that I use every day — double-digit addition, for example — but most of those lessons apparently didn't take as well as that bubble-filling lecture. If I missed any questions on that test (or any other I've taken since '95), it wasn't because the bubbles were improperly marked.

Thank you, Mrs. Holcomb.

2 comments:

Natasha said...

Oh my goodness Bre! I am the exact same way! Granted I didn't learn it at Falls Valley but I am OCD about having those bubbles filled in all of the way and not going outside the line. Wow...I'm glad that I am not the only one!

Melissa said...

Bubble sheets? Snuggies? I love it!! Send me your email address and I'll invite you to the family blog. It's awesome. ;)