Some of this “when I was a kid” stuff is creative exaggeration. However, it is fact that my friends and I walked a Rochester city mile in all sorts of weather to P.S. 30 on Otis Street. A fact that in winter our stubby little legs were encased in some bulky contraption called “leggings.” A fact that we slipped and slid across the icy overpass spanning Rochester’s fabled “subway that went nowhere.” And while only the walk “to” school was truly uphill, by afternoon the Earth’s rotation gave a slight upward tilt to the walk home.

Grade school was a different country back then. Technology consisted of colored chalk and #2 pencils. We rolled out ratty rugs for a daily nap on oft-drafty wooden floors. On warm days, the teacher actually opened the windows, a primitive precursor to central air. My first-grade teacher (Mrs. Garen, I think it was) earned about $3,000 in yearly salary. And, in a class fundraiser my mother won a third-place prize for her banana custard pie. Which somehow convinced her that school was a wonderful thing and that I should never miss a day.

In a sense, then, I owe my first teaching position — Canandaigua Academy, 1969 — to a well-baked banana custard pie. By then, things had changed immensely. I was able to drive to school. Uphill, but who cared? Classroom technology had progressed to overhead projectors. Mimeograph machines churned out copies of Robert Frost poems. And films, generously spliced, from Rochester’s Rundell Library provided a special........

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