An Elementary School Memoir
Navigating grades 1 to 5
Why not kindergarten?
Why not begin this story with kindergarten? After all, some kids never went to kindergarten. But the real answer is that it’s in grades 1 through 5 where you were supposed to get the basic skills you needed to be a minimally functioning citizen. The focus was on the classic “Three R’s”: reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. When I was growing up there was no early start on these skills, such as that provided by TV programs like “Sesame Street” and educational toys or computer games for pre-schoolers.
It’s not that I think kindergarten is unimportant. It’s more a question of what the world was like as I entered school for the first time in 1947, a time when much of the US population were trying to put their lives back together after four years of world war. Families had been broken by war injuries and deaths, juvenile delinquency was a problem for the whole society, and basic commodities like butter and sugar were in short supply. As a kid then you were doing great if you had a working father, a homemaker mother, and were adequately housed, clothed, and fed.
In that context I began my formal schooling. On the first day of kindergarten — a gray, rainy day that I’ll never forget — my mom packed me into a yellow rain slicker, a yellow sou’wester hat, and galoshes and sent me out to the bus stop. I got alone onto a bus I’d never seen before and was taken to a school I’d never been to with kids I didn’t know. At that time nobody thought that a four- or five-year old would need some kind of preparation for an experience like this.
Among the few things I remember from kindergarten are making Jell-O™ and having milk and cookies at snack time. Apart from occasional visits to the “naughty chair” there isn’t much else I can say about kindergarten.
First grade: life with Dick and Jane
Like generations of American children, we learned to read with the basal reader series, “Dick and Jane.” Dick, Jane, Sally, Puff (the cat), and Spot (the dog) were characters familiar to all elementary schoolers. This passage from a Wikipedia article captures the essence of the books:
“The Dick and Jane primers taught reading as well as American middle-class values to school-aged children. The storylines described the lives and experiences of a stereotypical American middle-class, white family in their suburban home. “Father” wore a suit, worked in an office, mowed the lawn, and washed the car. “Mother” stayed at home, did housework, and raised the children. “Dick”, the oldest of the family’s three children, was active and well-behaved; “Jane”, the second oldest child, was pretty and carefree. She also helped care for “Sally”, the baby of the family.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane
What most impressed me was that our teacher, Mrs. Pope, had a large version of our reader on an easel in front of the class so that she could point out the words for us as she read. It looked exactly like our readers, just much larger. I had never seen anything like that before.
Second grade: putting pencils to paper
By second grade we were sophisticated readers of Dick and Jane stories, which were stupid even for first graders. At recess we would regale each other with paraphrases of sentences from the books. Someone seeing my friend Jim running in from recess might shout “Run, Jimmy, run. Oh, see Jimmy run!” This was good for a guaranteed laugh from my classmates.
The big new thing in second grade was learning to write. We printed block letters on paper that had alternating wide and thin blue guidelines. These were designed to help us keep the “tall” letters (b, d, f, h, k, l, and t) and letters with descenders (g, j, p, and q) properly situated.
Day in and day out we did purely mechanical exercises in printing individual letters and words. But one day our teacher, Mrs. Malzman, threw us a curveball: she wanted us to write a story. At first I panicked. I didn’t know where to begin. Eventually I came up with a short paragraph whose topic I can’t remember now. But as I finished it, I suddenly realized that I’d actually written something on my own. This was a true “eureka!” moment. With my creative juices now flowing, I asked Mrs. Malzman if I could write another story, and she said yes. This little masterpiece I do remember. It was about a pony trotting around in its enclosure.
Third grade: mastering cursive writing
Our teacher, Mrs. Davidson, introduced us to “penmanship.” This is now probably a lost art since kids text each other all day long via the tiny keyboards on their smartphones. Each desk in our classroom had an inkwell, and we were provided with “straight pens” that would tear into the flimsy paper we used for practicing cursive writing. The idea was that this combination of pen and paper would force us to develop a light, fluid touch. My mom, who had been taught the same writing system thirty years earlier, had the beautiful, flowing handwriting the system was designed to produce.
I, mainly, ended up with blotches of ink on the paper and my fingers. Since cheap ballpoint pens had become available at about this time, the traditional elementary school skill of penmanship began to appear increasingly old-fashioned and irrelevant. With a ballpoint you could write on almost any kind of paper and the way you held the pen didn’t matter much.
I never mastered penmanship. My handwriting today doesn’t look very different from my childish scrawl in third grade. I’m amazed when I see the handwritten documents of America’s Founding Fathers — what calligraphic artistry they had! Without cellphones, social media, and other contemporary distractions, they had plenty of time to learn things like English grammar, Greek, Latin, and of course penmanship. And they had no email. So, unlike our casual e-correspondence, many of their beautifully penned letters are also carefully composed literary works in their own right.
Fourth grade: the world beyond our neighborhood
In fourth grade Mrs. Hopkins introduced us to Geography, and from that experience some of us developed a fascination for maps. There was so much interesting information packed into a compact display. Several large pull-down maps were hung on the walls of our classroom: the United States, Europe, Asia, and a world map.
Some of us, often stayed in from recess to find various places on the maps and to play map games. One game was to challenge the group to find some obscure place in the world (my favorite was Bhutan, a tiny country in the Eastern Himalayas). At that time we couldn’t have imagined an incredibly powerful geographic tool like Google Earth.
Fourth grade was also the class in which we began reading real literature and writing book reports, some of which we had to deliver orally in class. I think this is the stage where many kids become lifelong readers. The old “Nancy Drew” mysteries series and the colossally successful “Harry Potter” series are targeted to this age group. Unfortunately I didn’t develop the habit of reading regularly until I was an adult.
Fifth grade: serious science
Fifth grade was the pivotal one for me. I had a mad crush on our teacher, Mrs. Vivian (and a few years later I dated her daughter). She introduced us to science, but not as just another subject to be learned from a textbook and lectures. Instead, she took us around the school grounds to see what plants were growing there. She also took us on field trips to different habitats to see the kind of plants that grew in them but not around our school, and she showed us the reasons for the difference. Without saying so, she was introducing us to the concept of an ecosystem.
Mrs. Vivian was way ahead of her time in presenting science. I think fifth grade was the point where I and several of my classmates became science nerds. Later on some of us went on to successful careers in STEM fields.
Sixth grade: what happened to the girls?
I’m mostly drawing a blank on this grade. Did nothing of importance happen? Well, there was one thing. That year I was astonished that Linda, my friend and academic rival since first grade, suddenly stopped doing well in math. I couldn’t understand this. We had been the top two students in terms of grades for five years. I then noticed that other girls in my class had also become less capable in math.
This apparently widespread phenomenon has lessened somewhat since then. Over the 25 years I taught Computer Science at college level I found my women students just as capable as the men, and they got equally good jobs after graduation.
The stupidest test ever
Some time in the sixth grade we were given the stupidest test I’ve ever taken. Our teacher handed out blank paper and then began asking us questions like “What town do you live in?”, “What state do you live in?”, etc. They were so dumb that I thought they must be trick questions. Before writing each answer I spent some anxious moments trying to figure out what the question was really about. I was concerned there might be some terrible consequences if I gave a wrong answer.
In retrospect the purpose of this test was probably to check on our mastery of the basic information and skills all citizens must have; that is, it was a check to see if grades 1 through 5 had done their job. Whatever its purpose, the test was never mentioned again.
Grades 7 and 8: transition to the high school format
Seventh and eighth grades are the place where “content” became primary. For each subject area there was a specialist teacher who had his/her own dedicated classroom. Your personal base of operations was now your “homeroom,” and time was structured into “periods” that defined the duration of class sessions.
I have less vivid memories of my teachers in these grades. I think they were all competent, but they were essentially just delivering content.
But there were two teachers I did find memorable. Mrs. Mickens, a sprightly old lady who taught geography, bragged that she had jumped across the Allegheny River when she was a girl. It turned out that she grew up near Cobb Hill in northwestern Pennsylvania. At that location the river is a small stream perhaps two feet wide. She taught us little poem-like formulas to remember the principal products of each country we studied. For Siberia I still remember “rye, oats, potatoes, flax, and sugar beets.” It had a nice rhythm.
Another teacher, who will remain nameless, sneaked what is now known as “creation science” into her science course. That same year President Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. I wasn’t an atheist, but what appeared to me to be the inappropriateness of both events made me forever suspicious of the motives of authority figures.
Epilog
I’ve written in the Memoirist about high school (High School: Notes from a survivor) and college (The College Experience: The way we were). These experiences were important in their own way, but they didn’t have the foundational character of my first five years of elementary school.
Today, the contemporary media environment gives children many alternative sources of information and tools for learning, which can reduce the impact and perceived importance of traditional school. In addition, the appearance of “helicopter parenting” — parents’ efforts to spare their children any unpleasant experiences — has also changed the process of children growing into their roles in society
I was fortunate to have teachers who were dedicated professionals. In my own 45-year career as an educator, I’ve had the opportunity to observe many teachers and I’m convinced my schoolmates and I really lucked out.
