School Daze

By Mary Sharry
Sun contributor
School had just let out for the summer and here I was already thinking about fall, the new school year. Kindergarten was wonderful and then first grade with blackboards (I date myself) and chalk, oak tables and chairs, the cloakroom where in the winter snow-crusted mittens dripped onto the floor while the radiator sizzled. Along with crayons and the minty aroma of LePage’s paste, the smell inside my pencil box was especially pleasing — pink rubber erasers and wooden No. 2 pencils. The lid of the box was an eight-inch ruler. I loved loose-leaf notebooks with smooth lined paper, and imagined filling row upon row with cursive writing that slanted in one neat direction. Unfortunately, I was left-handed and when I finally learned to write in script my penmanship went all over the place — not neatly. Most everyday I played school, pretending to be the teacher, pretending to be a bright student. I could hardly wait.
Photo by Don Miller

At the end of August, before school began in September, my mother took me shopping for a new pair of Buster Brown shoes and a new dress. The dress had to be plaid, although I don’t know why. My mother simply said, “Oh yes, you always need a nice, new plaid dress for school.” Girls’ dresses then tied into a bow at the back, the tails of the bow often dipped into the toilet when we sat. Physical growth had rendered the previous year’s plaid dress too small, the hem couldn’t even be let down; so the dress marked a rite of passage into the new school year. The second grade.
My mother had sung the old refrain for me: “School days, school days, dear old Golden Rule days. Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of the hickory stick.” I don’t know if the stick was hickory, but it sure did hurt. I had been assigned to a different classroom from that of my friends. Here in a stark room where the windows were tall and the shades were rolled halfway down, we were strictly ordered to sit up straight, feet firmly planted on the floor. Inside those yellow walls we were hushed to be quiet so as to hear the pendulum tick-tock of the Regulator clock. Besides the clock and the silent American flag with its 48 stars, there were charts showing examples of the Palmer method of script. Above the blackboard hung Gilbert Stuart’s portrait print of George Washington.
For two weeks now I’d been in this second grade classroom where we began each day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “My Country ‘tis of Thee” and “Jesus Loves Me,” although there didn’t seem to be much love in this room. Here, in Miss Hunter’s domain, order was the rule. I broke the rule. I had placed a book on my head and turned to the boy beside me. “Look at my new hat, Robert,” I said. Robert, with his freckles and red hair, had been somewhat of a class pest, but I guess that on this day he had changed his ways. His arm and hand stretched upward. Waving and pointing he reported me to the teacher for disturbing him. I heard the hard sound of her thick-heeled shoes on the wooden floor. As quickly as you can say “Miss Hunter” she was standing there beside me, her grey gabardine skirt pressed against my desk. She made me hold out my hand, palm down, and then she rapped my knuckles with her black stick. It hurt, and I felt humiliated, but did not cry.
When I went home for lunch my father, who drove a milk route, had stopped home. I told him what Miss Hunter had done. He and my mother discussed the situation and decided I should stay home for the rest of the day. It was raining when he came home from work that afternoon. He drove me back to the school. The classroom was empty, but Miss Hunter was there at her desk. My father asked me to wait outside in the hallway while he went inside and talked with the teacher. Their voices rose against each other. When he emerged from the room, my father took me by the hand and we walked down to the principal’s office. The next morning I was in a new second-grade classroom with a different teacher.
Miss Arens welcomed me into her room where I recognized my friends from the previous year. Her bulletin boards were covered with pictures drawn by the children — blue skies, smiling suns, rainbows and trees with straight brown trunks circled by tulips. On her desk there was a vase of fresh flowers, daisies, I think. With her short wavy blond hair and her nails polished a delicate pink Miss Arens was beautiful. Her voice was melodic and soft, and she smelled of Ponds Cold Crème and Cashmere Bouquet soap. In her room we formed a circle and sang while she played the piano — She’ll be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain, A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go, Old MacDonald’s Farm. She played a recording of the Mexican Hat Dance and taught us the dance she had learned on a trip to Mexico. With real telephones loaned by Ohio Bell, we learned telephone skills, and played games of Memory and Twenty Questions. I loved the second grade.
My grandfather once told me about his school days and the boy who had to sit in a corner and wear a dunce cap because he did not read very well. As for punishment, writing one hundred times on the blackboard, “I will not talk out of turn,” pales in comparison to the story I heard of a teacher who ordered a child who had misbehaved to sit in a bushel basket. The teacher then told the other children to sweep the floor around their desks with their bare hands after which she dragged the basket along the rows of desks making each child dump the floor dirt onto the unfortunate boy in the basket. I remember the teacher who made a gum chewer wear his chewing gum on the end of his nose. Of course, the rest of the gum chewers, I was one, immediately swallowed theirs.
In the school district where my mother first began teaching back in 1941, women teachers were not supposed to marry. When my mother and father were first wed, she did not wear the ring on her finger; but word of their marriage got out, and she was dismissed. By that time, I was on the way. Eventually, attitudes and regulations changed and she resumed teaching.
When I was in high school, a girl could not continue with her education, if she became pregnant. Two of my friends were pregnant before their graduation. They had to get married, that being the protocol of the time. The girls were not allowed to complete school. Apparently, the notion was that these young mothers-to-be would tell their girlfriends how it happened and what ‘it’ was like. Sex education for girls meant a brief slide presentation with charts and drawings of fallopian tubes and figures of babies, upside down in the womb. I never knew what sort of film the boys saw. I never asked.
Back then some girls might go on to college, but in that era it was presumed that most of us would become homemakers. For the most part, besides the assumed goal of marriage, those who did continue their education had career choices — teaching or nursing.
In high school all girls took home economics where we learned how to make cottage pudding — egg, milk, sugar, baking powder and flour, and how to set a table. We learned how to sew, or at least we tried to learn. I never could. It took me forever to make the required gathered skirt, and by the last week of school when we were to wear our skirt to school, I had Scotch-taped the hem of mine.
There were three program choices in preparation for life after high school: A college-prep course, a general education course, or the commercial course. As my mother could not afford to send me to college on her meager first-grade teacher’s salary — she was a single parent by then and there was no wage parity for women teachers — the school decided for me that I would be tracked onto the commercial course. It was determined that I would become a secretary. No boys took the commercial course and those who did not plan to go on to college were left with the general course where they experienced wood shop and automobile engine repair — skills as useful as typing and shorthand, which served me well in my adult life.
I’ve grown away from the desire to fill page upon page with neat handwriting. My penmanship has hardly improved since those early years, but I am a fast typist. Today, instead of lined sheets of paper and pencils, something within me stirs at the sight and weight of a ream of typing paper. I write on my computer keyboard. The little paper-clip character displayed on my Microsoft Word document screen, the office assistance, is present. He allows me to pour forth. He doesn’t criticize. I don’t have to sit in a corner, nor must I hold out my hand for the knuckle rap. As with the end of the school year, we put unpleasant experiences behind us and move on to the work at hand.
Now summer is here. The clothing stores are already stocking up with clothes for the next school year. Come to think of it, I haven’t worn a plaid dress in years.