In 6th grade, I spent a week at 4,500 elevation somewhere in California with a hundred other sixth graders as part of our Outdoor Ed program. Everyone had been looking forward to it for years; I, at my sixth new elementary school that year, had heard no previous stories of the goings on the week of Outdoor Ed.
I learned miscellaneous skills like
how to whistle with an acorn shell, the necessity of drinking several quarts of water a day to stay hydrated at high elevation, and etiquette such as always passing the salt and pepper shakers together, or which side of the place setting utensils go on, and other things I don't remember or do anymore.
For an activity on the day before last, we sat down in a big room and were given half an hour to write a poem or a recollection about our experiences that week. I had a piece of paper and a crayon, and wrote about ten couplets about nature, throwing in (appropriately) some of the biggest words I knew. And I knew some pretty flowery language in sixth grade - reading was my official sport back then - and I even threw in some metaphors and similes. I'm pretty sure those couplets weren't in iambic pentameter but they definitely rhymed. I didn't put my name on it when we turned it in, partly because they said it could be anonymous but mostly because I ran out of room with my crayon.
The next day as we sat at correctly-set tables for breakfast before we were to be ferried back to suburbia by big yellow buses, one of the camp directors announced that they had come across something special from our activity yesterday and wanted to share it. My heartbeat started to drop, then race quickly as she started reading with careful inflection the poem I had scrawled in crayon. I prayed, prayed, prayed she wouldn't single me out as the author, and then realized she couldn't have since I didn't put my name on it, and then I wished instead that I had written my name. "There was no name on this poem, but I think whatever student wrote this really learned something this week." She said from the stage, far away from where I was sitting.
As we headed to the buses a half hour later, nobody in all the conversations I eavesdropped was talking about that poem. It probably wasn't that good, anyway, but I wanted to hear some validation of my writing, to see if anyone else had recognized whatever it was the director did. I pulled Raymond aside, one of my few friends. "You know the poem that the lady read? I wrote that yesterday."
"Oh, really?" He seemed enthusiastic, like he always did. "Good job! It was really good!"
"What did you think of it?"
"I liked it a lot."
"Thanks, Raymond." We got on the buses and went home.
