For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for June 15, 2019

oh, Elizabeth Patterson, NOW you’re wanting attention?

I once saw someone I hadn’t seen for a year and she just couldn’t figure out what was different about me. She kept going on and on about it. I now wore glasses and it didn’t dawn on me either that I didn’t have them before; so she remained confused.

Her elementary school has lockers? American elementary schools don’t have lockers because students stay in one classroom the whole year and their bags stay in their classrooms.

First she’s afraid everyone will notice and call her Four Eyes and now she’s upset no one notices. It’s better this way Elizabeth.

If she hadn’t said something probably nobody would have noticed.

Take them off Elizabeth and everyone will ask, where are your glasses.

You thought that kids would tease you because of your new glasses Elizabeth but it seems that they don’t care. What seems to be the problem?

My students will ask me where my glasses are the moment they see me. It could be the red color. Liz has the frameless one so it could blend in too well for anyone to immediately notice a new addition to the face.

When I was in first grade, we had coat/cloak rooms. I remember the teacher smelled poop once day and took the boy she suspected of going in his pants back into the coat room, pulling his pants down to check. (Yes, he was the offender). But can you IMAGINE a teacher pulling down a child’s pants in today’s world??? Whoa.

But the administrators (and some students) have access to your lockers at all times. It was a shock to learn even at school there was no privacy.

Best to get it over with, eh?

well, now they’ll notice!!

I think it depends on when the school was built. I started school in the early sixties in a small town further up north in Canada. We had a “cloakroom” where we hung our coats on a row of hooks and, in winter, placed our boots beneath them. Like @ktfahel, we also had “cubbies” to place our lunchboxes and such in. Near the end of grade three, my family moved further south to suburbs near Montreal and the school I attended there had lockers.

Our middle school has lockers. K-3 has hooks and rack in the hall outside the classroom. In my beloved ancient, Columbian School elementary in a small railroad town in rural NY state in the "50’s, we had “cloak rooms” in each classroom. All those old elementary schools are torn down, and never rebuilt because the railroad went out and so did the families that needed those neighborhood schools.

The tension was killing her. She is not a ‘take the band aid off slowly’ sort of girl.

Again, she overreacted to this

What’s worse for that age; thinking you are being laughed at or being ignored! I think it’s being ignored!

What’s the difference in pronunciation between “stupid” and “stoopid”? Literary tic, Ms. Johnston.

Kindergarten, 1960-61: cubby holes, partitions where we generally had our nap blankets. Maybe our coats. We were only there for half a day.

First through Fifth Grades, we had closets or coat rooms where we’d keep our coats and lunchboxes.

Sixth grade: our Board of Education, in their wonderful business experience “wisdom,” put us into the junior high schools, and thus we had lockers for the first time. We only changed classes for reading, but everything else was in the same home-room.

Seventh grade on up: lockers, changing classes every hour.

Lynn’s Comments:

In the first panel, you can see Elly twisting Elizabeth’s hair as she is getting it ready to put into a ponytail. I was able to draw things like this pretty realistically by using a Polaroid camera. I’d ask whoever was in the room to pose for me and I’d take the shot from the angle I needed. Somewhere I have an album filled with these crazy photographs!

Mouseman8, I went to elementary school in the 50’s in Cincinnati. We had cloakrooms for our coats and our desks were big enough for our books. We only changed rooms for art or music classes and we were not allowed to lift the desk lids in those rooms because they contained the property of the original student. Do you remember carrying “cigar boxes” for your things?

bobblumenfeld, 6 grades in elementary, 7,8,&9 in jr. high gave the 9th graders a little more confidence for going to sr. high. IMHO.

“The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.” — Oscar Wilde

I had a locker in elementary school in the USA.

When my husband first go glasses, no one commented. When he confronted his friends about it – they were a little confused. They worked so well that they had sort of figured he had always had them and they had not really noticed them before.