- The whole school had about 200 students.
- Each grade had their own building. A cute little pastel painted lumber schoolhouse with a coatroom, a bathroom and a classroom, plus maybe an addition like the school storage room (fifth grade) or kindergarten (fourth grade).
- To get to gym, we had to walk past several soccer fields' worth of grassland the school owned (that would later be filled with more buildings) and an apiary, and through a forest.
- Speaking of gym, the boys and girls had separate changing rooms but connected to the same shower room. I was the only one foolish enough to try showering after class. And I only tried it once.
- The school got a computer in I think 1994. For the office. It had the only 5 1⁄4-inch floppy drive I've ever seen in real life.
- On the other hand, there were pretty well stacked bookshelves everywhere. The highschool building (completed 1996) had a small library, but it only contained maybe half the books around school.
- There was no lending system of any kind. I took home a book I think was called "love and courtship in the southern seas" written in the 1950s that had several pictures of naked ladies in it and no one ever missed it.
- Behind the first grade house there was a very decently put together treehouse that I think not a lot of people actually knew about, given how rarely it was busy.
- Attached to the treehouse was a pair of elevated slack ropes that should have easily killed one kid a week but amazingly never did.
- Also in the rope murder department, there was a couple of swings suspended between treetops around the school grounds. The tallest one was maybe 4 or 5 meters. If you can't picture what a huge, hugely unsafe toy this is to be swinging around in every direction on, trust me that it's unbelievable no one ever fell off and broke anything.
- One time some 20 older boys tortured me by holding me onto this swing and twisting it until they couldn't reach anymore, and I was too high up to get off, so that I then spun so fast I had to discover the kind of strength you don't believe you have until you're actually fighting for your life, to hold on.
- The only consequence they faced for this was that a teacher talked to me about if I wanted them to apologize, while I was too shaken up to talk.
- What else. . .the school was on the other side of town from me. A 45 minute bus trip. That I made alone at ten years old. We didn't have cellphones in those days either. In fact I can't say for sure the school had a phone at all before '96.
I wonder sometimes how any children survived past the early 1900s, when they had baby drops. But then, I survived eating dumpster popcorn and all this too. . .
