I watched Keeping the Promise when I was in the fifth grade, just a few months after having read the novel on which it was based. The novel was provided to me, along with the rest of my classmates, in the form of 8½" x 11" packets, fresh from the Xerox machine. We'd get a handful of pages each weak, neatly stapled in the upper left-hand corner, and then break out into our assigned reading groups and take turns reading the story aloud to each other.
I was in the "slow readers" group, which consisted of the dumbest third of the class. I wasn't stupid and I wasn't even a slow reader, but I did have a pretty severe speech impediment, which is apparently why I was put into that group. It wasn't a stutter and didn't slow down my reading at all; it just made me difficult to understand, but putting me in with the slow readers didn't help anything. The teacher's aide—who was assigned to make sure my group didn't goof off during our reading time—even recommended to the teacher that I be moved to one of the more advanced reading groups, but the teacher rejected that notion. It was fine with me, as I preferred the slow readers to the bunch of nerds in the top third of the class. I think the middle group would have been the best. That's where all the normal kids were. But you can't have everything, I suppose.
At the end of the school year, on the very last day, the entire fifth grade was going to have a pizza party to celebrate our graduation from elementary school. We would eat pizza and watch movies in two of the three fifth-grade classrooms, with the third classroom going unused. I was in Mrs. Jacobs' class and the movies were to be shown in Mr. Boyd's and Mrs. Barrett's classrooms. It was well-known that Mr. Boyd was the cool teacher and Mrs. Barrett was the opposite of that. This was confirmed in the weeks prior to the planned event when rumors began circulating on the playground and in the school bus that the party in Mr. Boyd's classroom would be vastly different than the one in Mrs. Barrett's classroom, and would include lots of candy, ice cream, silly string, games, a piñata, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and an overall pleasant atmosphere, while Mrs. Barrett's party would consist of cheese-pizza only in a strict no-talking/no-yawning environment that felt more like prison than a classroom.
Each student was allowed to choose for themselves which event they wanted to attend, and we were all formally asked to declare our wishes one week before the date. Naturally, nearly everyone said they wanted to go to Mr. Boyd's classroom. But that must have made Mrs. Barrett feel pretty bad, because the teachers came back and said we weren't allowed to pick the classroom we wanted to go to, but could only pick which of the two movies we wanted to see.
Once again, rumors circulated, leading us all to believe that Keeping the Promise would be shown in Mr. Boyd's classroom, while Mrs. Barrett would be showing something else that I can't remember the name of. So I chose to see Keeping the Promise, along with the vast majority of my class. But the teachers had lied to us and they had tricked us. They decided they wanted to outsmart a bunch of ten-year-olds and ruin their special day, although I am convinced that cool Mr. Boyd had nothing to do with the scheme. Keeping the Promise was played in Mrs. Barrett's dungeon and the other one was shown in Mr. Boyd's classroom, contrary to what we had been led to believe.
The funny thing is that the students in Mr. Boyd's and Mrs. Barrett's classrooms learned of the switcheroo at the last minute and were able to change their decisions and go party in Mr. Boyd's classroom, while Mrs. Jacobs' unsuspecting students—myself included—were escorted to Mrs. Barrett's place of misery.
No ice cream for us. No piñata. No fun. It took me a little while to realize that the film I was watching was based on a book I had read, as the title was different. The book is called "The Sign of the Beaver." Saddened at my misfortune and envious of the students in Mr. Boyd's classroom, I had to hold back tears as I watched Keeping the Promise with my friends from Mrs. Jacobs' class, along with a few of the nerds from the other classes who had enjoyed the book and wanted to see the film version.
Like I was saying before, you can't have everything.
