Fifth Grade

My dad lost his job at the bank a few months before my fifth grade. We couldn't afford the house payments so we moved from our lower middle class existence in the village to our old house in the town proper of Mariveles, Bataan. My mom's parents had given us this house built on rented land. The landowner apparently did not want to sell off the land. So, in theory we could have been evicted at any point. My mom felt guilty when one day the landowner fell off the roof of his house. She wasn't sure whether she's partly to blame for thinking that the landowner was very mean.

I guess my parents could not afford to send me to private school that year so I attended the local public school. It was a totally different experience. The new school is really huge. There was at least 8 sections of 30 students in my grade.
I did not have problems at all fitting in at the new school. I even learned a very important lesson that year. That it is no big deal to "fail". I have gotten top academic honors the 2 prior years at the old school. It was a shock to me that at the end of the fifth grade, I only finished second. I was still number one academically but somehow the overall marks also depended on "character". It was not clear to me that I was assigned to clean the windows. Since apparently I did not clean the windows, I did not get a good grade for "character". That was the last year they graded "character" that way. We grew up mostly having household help so up to this day you still can't expect me to volunteer for household chores :).