On my first day of school in the first grade I remember not wanting to go to school that day because I wanted to stay at home with my baby brother who had only been born a few months earlier in June. I wanted to stay home and play with my new brother and my younger sister. I didn’t want to leave them when I got to the school, I wanted nothing more than to walk back home with them. When I got to the classroom I remember wondering what happened to all the stations that were in my kindergarten classroom. There were no stations full of toys and no reading stations, there were only desks. And at one end of the classroom there was a large desk, one that was very unproportionate to all the rest of the desks in the room. It turned out that that was the desk of my teacher, Mrs. Smiley. The walls were these soft orange things with silver around the edges, I later learned that they were able to be taken down in order to share our space with the classroom next to us. The floors were covered with this dark brown carpet that was very short and not at all soft, it was not inviting me to lie down and take a nap like I used to do in my kindergarten class. I wondered why after lunch we didn’t get to take a nap like we had the year before. I could hardly wait for my Mother to come and pick me up so I could see my baby brother again.