I was a silent stalker during elementary and high school.
Sounds ominous, right? Just exactly who did I stalk?
For whatever reason, from my first day of my two weeks as a Headstart student to the end of my public-school student experience, I was fascinated with schools and teachers. Same with church and preachers. Same with funerals and undertakers. Anything that had an air of formality and order attracted my attention.
This fascination led to childhood role playing. Being a child to me was like being an actor—I played different roles depending upon my most recent school, church, funeral and television experiences.
If in my actual life I could be everything that I role played as a child, I’d have to live many years longer than is normally allotted to any human.
What many people don’t realize is that role playing for a child is a means of self-discovery. I fear that is what is wrong with so many of today’s children—telephone and internet have taken the place of role playing, replacing the growing up years with too much knowledge gleaned about things that are perhaps best never learned, or learned at a later time in life when maturity provides enough sensibility to control that knowledge in a non-destructive manner.
My role playing finally settled on two things—school and church. As far as my career, school won out.
I decided very early in life that I wanted to teach. I know this decision was based in great part on the public character of my teachers. Union County has had many great teachers in its history, and still does, but I know that the group of teachers I had were among the finest that could be found anywhere.
With these fine models right in front of me for 36 weeks for twelve years of my life, I got to study not only the subjects they taught, but the way their instruction was delivered. I watched every move they made.
I was always fascinated by those registers they used to keep in elementary school. I knew they included attendance, but I craved to know what else. I knew they were very important, and that teachers kept them as neat and clean as possible, though I didn’t know their ultimate value.
Those registers were the “computers” of the school system for many decades. The first registers on file at the Union County Board of Education date to 1932, and the last registers were kept my first year of teaching, 1987-1988. The registers contained attendance and demographic records for every teacher and student in the school system.
Teachers had to sign an affirmation in the register that all information was true and correct, and that affirmation had to be certified by a notary public at the end of the school year. The registers are still used to help provide information to help people obtain birth certificates, social security and other similar government benefits. They are also very beneficial for historical research.
I was always interested in what teachers did on those mysterious inservice days when students were not required to attend school. I discovered that from my own teaching experience. It was a revelation for sure, though not quite as mysterious as expected.
When I was in seventh grade at Maynardville Elementary we were departmentalized (i.e., we changed classes). We were located in the portable classrooms behind the main building, between the building and the “new” Highway 33. The classrooms inside the main building only had metal storage cabinets, but each of those portable classrooms had a storage room.
I always found those rooms interesting as they were usually restricted from student use. Ms. Martha Warwick sometimes typed her tests. I thought she was practically a wizard because she could type. She kept her tests (and I wondered what else) locked in her storage room.
Many of the things that fascinated me about school when I was a child no longer play a part in modern education. I loved it when teachers used the “pull-down” maps. I would have almost killed to have just one of those maps, but they were out of my reach at the time.
I also loved the older furniture. Teacher desks were wooden then, usually with one drawer above the pigeonhole and two drawers on the other side. Sometimes the pigeonhole was on the left, sometimes on the right. Those wonderful pull-out lapboards on which I read Tip and Mitten to the legendary Hazel Walters Butcher in the first grade and Jack and Janet to Ms. Leah Wolfe in second grade were located just above the side drawers. Occasionally a teacher would have a larger desk with drawers on both sides, as did W. A. Hartsell at Horace Maynard High School.
There were also those real wood tables with the little wooden chairs. That furniture was like a Timex watch—it could take a “licking and keep on ticking.”
Sadly, practically all of that wonderful furniture, which if cared for could still be in use, is gone. Occasionally a few pieces can be found in storage or for sale at a thrift store. This furniture has in most cases been replaced by more colorful plastic and metal pieces.
I also paid attention to my fellow students. I remember many of them carrying the metal lunch boxes to school. They featured scenes from the most popular television and movies of the time. For some reason I found Jonathan Livingston Seagull fascinating, though to this day I have never seen it.
In high school, some students made use of the pay phone that was in the lobby. There wasn’t a lot of time for this, as there was the one phone for the entire student body, and there were only five minutes between classes. No student with any sense of self-interest wanted to be found talking on that phone during class time by Principal Joe Day unless they had his specific permission, which would have been almost impossible to obtain. Pay phones are now a thing of the past. School teachers and administrators now wrestle with students’ personal cell phones.
Also practically gone from the educational scene is the overhead projector and transparencies. When I was in first grade, Ms. Hazel taught manuscript handwriting using transparencies. We used those oversized (jumbo, fat, chubby) pencils in first grade. I haven’t seen one of those pencils in years. Even though I am lefthanded, I was a terrific manuscript writer, but I found cursive with the normal sized pencils more challenging. The soft approach to learning cursive writing didn’t work for me—it took Ms. Marie McPhetridge Lynch in sixth grade to “put the fear” in me enough for me to become proficient in cursive.
Classrooms of my childhood might have varied in many ways, but there was one standard—the green chalkboard. Chalk dust is not compatible with modern computers, and those very computers and SMART Boards have taken the place of so many of the old classroom staples—pull down maps, overhead transparencies, and filmstrip projectors, to name a few.
But the chalkboard in its day reigned supreme, the key audio-visual for the greater part of two centuries of American education. Very few are still in use, but my teachers revered them. I remember how proud Ms. Wanza Sharp was when the wooden frames and chalk rails of her main blackboard were varnished. They did shine pretty, and the smell of the varnish lingered for a long time.
Ms. Sharp would stand us in chairs and let us work incredibly long, long-division problems. She valued the chalkboard so much as a teaching tool that she had a blackboard mounted in the back of her classroom to provide additional board space. Ms. Sharp was the only teacher at Maynardville Elementary that I knew to have two blackboards.
I was thrilled when I taught at Luttrell Elementary to always have a classroom that had two chalkboards. Whether green (as at Maynardville Elementary) or brown or gray (as at Luttrell Elementary), there is no feeling a teacher can experience to match the use of the chalkboard—the sound of the chalk clicking (or screeching) across the surface, the coughing from the abundant chalk dust when erased, the yellow or white dust on clothes at the end of the teaching day.
Perhaps I’ll live to see what takes the place of what is currently in use in public schools, but who knows? The basic structure of the American public-school classroom did not change much for decades, but when change came it came suddenly.
One thing remains constant—there are children who need teachers to provide instruction in skills to produce productive citizens to promulgate the continuance of America.
I leave you, Dear Reader, with a few thoughts shared with me via email.
Questions You Might Ask Your Child or Grandchild About School
Who do you eat lunch with at school?
Who is your favorite and least favorite teacher this year?
Is bullying a problem at your school?
Is drug and alcohol use a big thing at your school?
What is the best and worst food that your school cafeteria serves?
Which teacher at your school is the scariest?
How clean are your school bathrooms?
Do all these school shootings in the news make you feel unsafe at school?
What was the best/worst part of your day today?