By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--January 2, 2024
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The elementary years were generally good for me. Still deep in the awkward stages, I didn’t like going to school, but I found lots of subjects to hold my interest. Fourth grade with Mrs. Miller was challenging with that impossible Palmer handwriting, and sixth grade was tough because Mrs. Holder didn’t appreciate the Goldwater sticker and quote on my notebook. Fifth grade, however was a delight, with the kindly Mrs. Kessler effortlessly keeping good order among her 40 charges, including me. She was firm, but she smiled often and made it clear that she loved her work and loved us. I basked in her glow and gave her my best efforts.
The school system was declining without us knowing, but still pretty decent in many ways. The New Math came along in 4th grade and permanently crippled my math skills. Classes were very large for our pig-in-the-python boomer cohort, one class I remember had 42 students, but only one teacher per class was allowed or needed. We still had the real slate blackboards, smooth as butter and satisfying to write on with white or yellow chalk, unless we were called up against our will. I can still remember the scent of chalk dust from the long erasers made with foam rubber, a piece of wood, and a leather covering on the hand side. I also remember the euphoria of being given the task of going outside at the end of the day to knock the dust out of all the room’s erasers on the brick wall around the corner. Special privileges already, and a taste of the freedom that would come with the dismissal to humpbacked yellow school buses in less than an hour! Of course, with that many students in each class, my turn for cleaning erasers seemed to come around about as often as a blue moon. I still didn’t know what a blue moon was, but I liked the song by the Marcels that came out in 1961.
There was no ADHD diagnosis yet, and corporal punishment was still legal and used often enough to strike fear into every child’s heart. If you were a boy whose age was still in the single digits or even age ten or eleven or more, you just had to find a way to curb your own excesses. Believe me, we had motivation!
I found most learning to be just plain fun and so interesting! Reading and spelling and geography especially were subjects I welcomed almost every day that year. We had all been taught to read phonetically, so we’ve enjoyed reading ever since. We read the instructions and read the stories and read about other places and times giving us plenty of distractions.
We had a geography textbook that year. I think the one that featured Pierre, Peter, and Pedro as a way to expose us to cultures in Canada, the States, and Mexico might have been third grade, but the fifth grade geography was better. We focused for quite a time on South America, a place I had heard of but didn’t know much about. My older brothers had globes and world maps and we subscribed to the National Geographic, so I had seen strange people and places from around the world, but this particular geography book captivated me right away.
We learned the names of the countries and made maps. The........