Starting in the first grade and ending in the fifth, I attended Rosevelt Elementary School under the principal Lynn Kargas. The first two years were great!

In first grade, I had home room under the guidence of Mrs. Beaver. She was a nice woman in her early 40s, and she always knew how to make us happy. My first day of elementary school was spent in her classroom sitting on the floor while she read us short stories from some hundred or so mini-books in her room. The names of the kids around me included Nate Green, Patty Dickenson, David Moronez, Nate and Paige Thieler, Amy Koch, Cara Colson, Greg Stedman, and Emily Dolan. These would all be names to follow me to my senior year at Craig High School.

On day two, we began circulated our classes, and I found myself in the hands of who I believed to be the coolest teacher alive, Mrs. Fox. Mrs. Fox was a sly woman who knew magic tricks and was very funny. She taught English/grammar class, and never made it boring. Every week she would give us a ten-word spelling test which was always easy.

The next teacher I would meet was Mrs. Casey. She taught us math and had a great way of explaining numbers to us. I never grew attached to her, though sometimes I wish I had.

Later in the year, Mrs. Casey disappeared and was replaced with a new long-term teacher who still works in Mrs. Cassey's position today. One day, after we went out for morning recess, we were never called back in by the teachers. They just stood at the top of the hill where the school was talking with each other. I later found out, years later, that Mrs. Casey had died earlier that day after losing who battle with cancer.

My intelligence began to take flight during the first grade. By the second quarter, I had taught myself the times table and could multiply with ease. My observational skills also began to grow at that time. With that came the ability to remember details and utilize my partially photographic memory.

First grade flew by and gave way to the second grade. In the second grade, Mrs. Boylen was my homeroom teacher. The first day of class was boring. She spent the day going over the grade rules, and I spent the day staring at the cloud shapes in her room and basically sleeping with my eyes open.

It was that year that I became friends with David Moronez, who would end up being a very good friend of mine throughout the rest of my life, even today. David was and always has been a small guy. Today, I tower over him. But we got along very well, and we always had fights over the absolute most stupid things imaginable.

Second grade went by without a hitch. I was seven-years-old when I moved on to the third grade.

Throughout the summers, when school wasn't in session, I would attend the Salvation Army's day camp here in town. That's where I met Greg Stedman, and kid who went to school with me. Greg and I became very good friends through the earlier years of elementary school, and we always were playing games and completely obsessed with the Power Rangers (mighty morphin, none of the crap you see today).

The day camp was always loaded with fun. There was a Super Nintendo with awesome games and lots of kids to play with. Every afternoon we'd board a bus and go swimming up in Evansville. So much fun! But that's when I began to taste what the rest of my schooling years would be like through the assistance of Zach and Zaine, two twin brothers.

Zach and Zane loved to pick on the younger kids, and they loved to torment me ruthlessly. Anything they could find about me that was what they thought of as being teasable they would tease. The one thing I can thank them for, though, is my craze for The Legends of Zelda. They decided that since I was seven and couldn't beat Link to the Past, that I was teaseable for it. I beat the game just to spite them, and I've since fallen in love with the entire series.

Later on, Greg and I would be split after a new kid named Aaron Benn started coming to the day camp. Aaron was a bad kid and a complete ass, and he appealed to Greg. Eventually, Greg and I would part ways because of the two very different paths in life we were taking.

One person who I met there has had a very deep and significant impact on my life. Her name was Ashley Byrd, and she turned out to be the best friend anyone could ever hope to have. Ashley was a girl who loved me from the moment she met me, and to this day loves me. Anyone who would mess with me and I didn't know about it, she'd kick their ass regardless of whether or not I wanted her to. To this day, we have a running joke about what she used to do to get me to do things. If I would tell her "No" to anything she wanted, she would drop to her knees, wrap her arms around my legs, and yell, "Grahamy no love me no more!" It was a very quick way of getting me to do whatever it was she wanted me to do.

She would be one of the few people who would change my world years down the road.

Starting in the third grade, students began to learn that I was an easy target for teasing. Why? I've always been a passive person. No matter how pissed I've been, I've never thrown a punch of physically reacted to anyone. So kids began to find ways to tease and harass me ruthlessly.

This torment followed me throughout all of elementary school and eventually lead to me becoming extremely self-concious of everything about me, including my name. One girl, Jonelle Fraiser and a boy named Jason Bergeron found it particularilly fun to tormet me and get all of their friends to join in. Jason convinced kids to never be near me or around me. So for a period, students would part and avoid me screaming and laughing at me. At the same time, Jonelle came up with the phrase, "Milk the cow, milk the cow, moo moo moo." and used it against me to get her friends to join in.

This went on throughout my entire elementary school time. So I ended up becoming isolated from most of the kids, and I ended up being driven deeper into my depression. At school I had these kids who decided that I was raw meat, and at home I had Dean who did the same. But what could I do about it? The only person I ever turned to was David Moronez, and eventually Vicky Emmens in the forth grade.

Throughout all of my torment, a person stepped forward who was new and ignored what the others said. Up until that point, every new kid would realize that I wasn't the popular kid, so they would treat me the same way the popular kids would just to be recognized. The person who came forward was Victoria Emmens. She would enter my life in the second semester of the forth grade, and a great friendship would follow us all the way through high school graduation.

At one period during the fifth grade, I had considered suicide to end the torment. Between Dean and the kids at school, I had no idea what to do. My mother never stopped Dean, and the position of the school district was, "We didn't see it, so we can't prove it happened." Today, that is no longer the case. My mother has moved heaven and Earth to get the policy of the school district changed. She is a well-known and well-feared woman.

With Dean's suicide, I felt that half of the weight had been lifted off of me, and I could for once breathe again. Though the school district didn't want to acknowledge that there were problems with the students harassing me, after his suicide they told me I had best wait a week before returning from Christmas Vacation. We knew this was because they were worried about what the students might say, and they had ever reason to worry so.

Upon me returning to school in January, I was accused several times of being the reason Dean killed himself. I was even called killer by some students. The week I spent at home while school was in session lead to the suspension of thirteen students due to their comments about me and Dean's suicide. The week I came back, another thirty or so students were suspended because of their blatently rude and assulting comments. If that didn't force the school district to believe something was going on, then I don't know what did.

From the third grade and on through the fifth grade, I had in-school counseling for the problems that I had with the students. Barbera Fett was her name, and she became a constant survival post for me. She documented everything that happened to me and when it happened. We would meet once a week, and I would just lay it out everything that would happen. She had hundreds of written pages about what had happened and who did it.

The reason most of the students never really were dealt with also was in-part due to Lynn Kargas' denial. Her daughter was like those kids, only in higher grade levels. To acknowledge there was a problem, Lynn would have had to punish her daughter publically as well as the rest. To this day, Lynn Kargas is incredibly submissive to my mother and I.

During forth grade, my time spent with Mrs. Fett compelled her to has the government test my IQ. At the time, I didn't know what was going on, but my mother did. The school social worker had a government doctor testing a select number of students, and I was one of them. Over the period of a month, the doctor would subject me to games and puzzels. There was this one puzzel she gave me of a bunch of pieces which looked like a soccer ball. She told me, "This is a puzzle of a soccer ball. Arrange it as fast as you can." The test wasn't to see how fast I could put the puzzle together, but to see how fast I could identify that the information she gave me was wrong, and that it was infact a honey comb puzzle. The state-wide average for figuring this out was 2 minutes and 20 seconds. I figured it out in 15 seconds. Actually, I had it figured out in 15 seconds and finished in 20 with the comment, "You lied."

My IQ came out to be 139, but it came with the note, "This number is lower than it should be, as students who suffer from ADHD typically score 10 to 20 points lower than they should due to a problem with focus." And how true that was. At the time, no medicine could supress my ADHD enough to let me focus on anything for very long.

Though, starting with puberty, I began to be able to take control of my ADHD and OCD, but enough control wouldn't surface until mid-way through high school. Instead, I began to focus total control of my memory and abilities, and I started scoring perfect scores on tests due to my memory. Though, I did misspell "nuclear" with the excuse that, "No smart person would think that nucular is spelt nuclear. I don't hear 'clear' anywhere in it." lol

One major growth with me that took place in the forth grade was my passion to play music. I began playing the Viola under the teachings of Kay Gray, an awesome woman for whom I will always respect. My first few years playing the Viola were spent dinking around while learning at the same time. Incredible focus is needed to play well, and as I said, that didn't come until sometime in high school.

So exit Graham from the elementary school days as an eleven-year-old headed towards the sixth grade.

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