 |
PatchWork
by
Joyce Whitis |
Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Did you hear that
great big sigh this week? It started from the
crowd of cars and trucks that crept away from the curb in front of every public school in
the county and finished at least three blocks later.
Summer-worn parents and other child care providers mentally gave each other
high fives all the way down the street. The kids
are back in school! I think I’ll go
somewhere and have a quiet lunch. Not that we
don’t love and appreciate our kids but sometimes it’s a relief to toss them to
somebody else for awhile. Everybody gets a
lift from the beginning of yet another school year.
Teachers, children, parents, and all the merchants in town are thrilled with
the prospects of another round of activity.
For older members of the community, memories of school days past crowd the mind and
set the rocking chairs to moving. A cup of
coffee and a slow rocker can do wonders for an aching back or sore joints. My own favorite rocker and my personally marked
coffee mug brought cheer me this morning while my still sleepy body slid into a
remembering mode. I was six in that January
so long ago and when September came, it was time for me to go to school. School was a
glorious thought. Going to school was a thing
that only “big” kids got to do and now I was big enough! It was an exciting time. The two-room schoolhouse was about two miles from
our farm. I’d visited there with my
cousins and I knew how it would be to learn to read and to write and to spell and do
numbers. When the day came, I could hardly
wait to put on one of the dresses my mother had made on her Singer sewing machine. I had my school supplies, a Big Chief tablet and a
cedar pencil with an eraser on the end. My
dad took out his pocketknife and sharpened that pencil for me before he took me to school. “You don’t want to waste your pencil in
a mechanical sharpener,” he said. “A
pocket knife is better. Just bring your
pencil home every day and I’ll sharpen it for you.” The first day
of school was exciting. There were three in
the first grade! Besides me there was my best
friend, Bobby and her cousin, Robert, who also happened to be my boyfriend. Robert cracked and passed pecans to me during the
third grade morning reading class. I ate the meat and stowed the shells inside my desk
until Miss Calhoun stopped that. They
weregood pecans and I was hungry around 10:00 but I learned on that first day that
snacking in school was not a great idea. There were four grades in our room. The first grade, that was my grade, sat on the
first row. The second grade on the second
row, the third grade on the third row (this included my cousin, Frankie) and cousin Wynell
was on the fourth row and in the fourth grade. The
big kids were in the other room and included the next four grades. We hardly dared think about them and how powerful
they were.
Our teacher was an unmarried woman with a great affection for children. From the first day, I loved her next to my mother
and my sisters. She worked magic in the
classroom teaching four grades in succession and neglecting none. I learned to read in a few weeks and could read
anything stuck before me. I remember cutting
and pasting pictures from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, a staple in the home in my day,
and fastening them with flour paste to tablet paper.
“Find something that begins with an A,” she would say and we would go
home and search until we found a picture of an automobile, or something. Then we’d stick it on the paper with homemade
paste. “Find something that begins with
B” she would continue and so we would, my parents and I, and soon we had pages and
pages of letters and words and without quite knowing how it happened, I was reading. Miss
Calhoun was the beginning of a wonderful experience in reading and learning. She should get a gold star before her name in the
book of life. And so should all the other
teachers out there who work and love and teach our children.