a sobering moment

II.

When I was in fifth grade, I won the school spelling bee. It was a source of great excitement in our classroom, because the winner had historically always been a sixth-grader. I spelled acronym and then khaki correctly for the win, and everyone cheered. My friends were all excited and we went skipping down the halls back to our classroom, making far too much noise but even the yard duty monitors didn't yell at us because we were normally the well-behaved ones, and they knew the spelling bee had just ended. I felt smart and loved and invincible.

And then we walked into the classroom, and our usually beaming teacher was solemn and quiet. The school-issue VCR was set up in front of the classroom, and that's when we found out that the Challenger shuttle had exploded. We watched the tape in silence, against the backdrop of all the posters we'd drawn, full of hope and stars and pictures of Christa McAuliffe, a teacher much like our own.

Wednesday 23 January, 04:31 PM