APR 2024
ISSUE N.9
DAVIDSON DAY UPPER SCHOOL
PG 1
UNTOLD STORIES OF DDS Issues 9 and 10 of UNTOLD STORIES OF DDS are a collection of articles by students enrolled in Mr. McGill’s Creative Writing class.
THE LIFERS AND MRS. FARRAH BY SONIA SURDULESCU
I
grew up in a household where English was not the primary language. I only spoke my parents’ native language, as it was all they had taught me. My parents wanted to put me in a Montessori program, and the closest option to our home was Davidson Day. This was around 2008, when I was two, so the school was fairly new, and has just transitioned to a larger building compared to its previous home. I struggled to adapt, since the only language spoken at school was English. As a result, I became withdrawn within the classroom. My parents enlisted the help of the teacher I had at that time: Mrs. Farrah. She sometimes came to my house after school to help me with learning English. Since I was also struggling with finding friends, Mrs. Farrah set up a play date between me and another student in the class: Reagan Davidson.
L to R: Sonia Surdulescu, Sydney Tate, Mrs.Farrah, Reagan Davidson, Ashlyn Letarte
Reagan and I became friends quickly. Like me, she wasn’t very outgoing, but we connected instantly. “When I started out in Mrs. Farrah’s class,” Reagan said recently, “I was super shy and sat in the corner (of the classroom) with a stuffed animal fish she gave me. I would not talk to anyone. Even my parents would come in and teach the class about keeping your teeth clean, with little puppets, to try and get me more comfortable with the class setting. It took me till about kindergarten for me to get out of my shell, and my parents were considering holding me back a year.” At our play dates we always found fun things to do together. I
JILLIAN.TOYA@DAVIDSONDAY.ORG SMCGILL@DAVIDSONDAY.ORG
vividly remember the time we decided to play “three little pigs. Reagan and I were the pigs (even though there were two of us) and Mrs. Farrah was the big bad wolf. We had various tents set up around the backyard, and Reagan and I would hide in each of them until Mrs.Farrah would “blow the house down” with a leaf blower. In comparison to Reagan, another one of my classmates, Ashlyn Letarte, was a chatterbox. “I started Mrs. Farrah’s class and I was very talkative and I was the loudest one,” she said. “I walked in
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