Teachers

It's said that those who can do and those who can't teach. Someone said that those who can't teach teach gym. Both seem to be accurate. The first grade was something most anyone should be able to handle, teach kids the essentials. Alphabet, drawing the letters on the tablets with the two solid lines with a dashed line between them was where you made the letters with the big pencil, about twice as thick as a regular one. Don't know why they used those. Handy for carpentry though. I don't remember much else, except the teacher flagged me right off. I knew all the colors of the dozen or so pictures of horses in a line along the top of the blackboard. I could already make all the letters, no problem. I could read too, for a couple of years. I believe there were a couple of other kids that could read, seems they had been to pre-school.

Sometimes the teacher would give us paper to draw on with our crayons and pencils, sometimes it was discarded material that was blank on one side. One day we had some pieces of card stock, about six by ten or so, printed on one side. So I turned the card over and started reading. It was something from a local seed company, where the farmers bought their seed, soybeans, rice, cotton, wheat. I was trying to figure out what some of the terminology was, what did 'book your seed by September' or something like that. I didn't understand the meaning of book in that context. Hell, I was only six.

Anyhow the teacher must have noticed but didn't say anything, and after a while I turned it over and wrote on like the other kids were doing. Actually they were drawing, I may have been drawing too.

Couple of days later the principal came in. I believe he had been a time or two before, he goes over to the teacher and she brings him over to my desk.

Uh-oh, what'd I do now? Actually I didn't get in trouble much, being a quiet kid and naturally well-behaved. Principal holds out his left hand so I can see his watch, asks if I know time it is, I tell him. He sticks his hand in his pocket and pulls out some coins, lays them on the desk, asks how much money there is. I count it and tell him.

Don't remember if he asked me anything else, I suppose the teacher had told him I could already read and write. He went away and I didn't think much about it.

That was the principal Andy asked for the sand.

Anyway there wasn't much to teach me, maybe that left some extra time for the other kids.

One or two kids failed first grade, that was probably the case in the other classes, two or three of about thirty kids each as I recall. One that failed in another class I got to know later, not because I especially wanted to as he wasn't a very pleasant sort. But you hang with certain people you are sometimes exposed to other people that you wouldn't choose to be around.

Sometimes you wonder why those people you're hanging with want to be around those people. There are reasons, as I learned.

In fact the kid that failed the first grade and I later encontered under those circumstances occasionally was what some would say singularly unpleasant. Sounds British, singularly something or other. Spent some time in the UK later, that seems typically British, like Major (later Lt. Colonel) Sawyer's typically British secretary as he called her. But I digress.

I'll probably digress a fair bit, as some things get mixed up in strange ways, connections. That TV show back in the day, before the abomination known as 'reality TV' was invented, British dude named James Burke. Wonder if he's extant. Google it? Why not, I got all night.

It is my distinct pleasure to inform the gentle reader (where does that come from? Hmm, Google some more... no, let me finish this) that Mr. Burke is indeed extant at this point in time. Anyway, I always enjoyed that show.

As I was saying before the first digression, the singularly unpleasant fellow will show up later, like the proverbial bad penny. But for now let's finish the first school year.

Okey-dokey, that was about it. Probably some other stuff happened but none of it seems to be especially important. Let's move on.

Second grade was, well, second grade. Don't remember what the learning was, probably we got our first reader as they called them, books with Dick and Jane and Spot and the other denizens of children's books of the day. Actually there was no Dick and Jane, but danged if I can remember who there was. Now a few years ago I had a heart attack, after surgery to prevent a heart attack, and with the usual competence of the Medical Industry types these days I ended up with fourteen minutes of respiring or circulation. Most people have the decency to assume vegetatism after a few minutes but I didn't have the decency to do even that, much less expire and let them have my parts. No, I had to wake up and ask what the hell was going on. But I digress. Again.

Major later Lieutenant Colonel Sawyer was a U.S. Air Force officer by the way, we were in England at a U.S. base and hired British civilians for some jobs like Major Sawyer's secretary. She was a cutie too.

Where was I? Well, second grade was 1962 and we all know what happened. Kennedy upset some of the wrong people and they made him go away. Mrs. Cooper, our teacher, came in and told us the terrible news. I was seven years old and barely knew who he was. But it was terrible for sure. And a few days later we all went to Mrs. Cooper's house to watch the funeral. I being the teacher's pet - not an honor I sought and would have avoided had I foreseen the repercussions - I sat on Mr. Cooper's lap in his easy chair with the other kids scattered around the place and watched the show. This was 1962 and a lot of people didn't have televisions, and they didn't have them in the classrooms, so we went to the teacher's house. I don't know if the other classes went somewhere or if Mrs. Cooper did it special for us. Pretty sure I'm not going to find out now. What with her being non-extant for some years now.

That may have been, probably was the most significant thing that happened that year. We did the second grade stuff and presumably prepared for the third grade went on to that. After the summer vacation.

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Third grade we went to the new school, I believe it had just been built a couple of years earlier. First and second grades had been in two old buildings in the old part of town, near the courthouse. Once in a while we'd see a prisoner being taken into the jail, which was near the courthouse. Police department was there, where you could do your driver's test on Wednesday or Thursday, I forget which. State Police would send some one to admister the tests, if you passed the written test you could come back on another Wednesday or Thursday and take the road test. Which I did, when I was sixteen. State trooper that did my test got killed a few years later, captured an escaped prisoner and the guy had a gun he didn't see. Seemed like a nice enough fellow (the trooper, not the felon that killed him, I never met him) but then he was just giving me a driver's test and not collecting revenue. Had one or two of those, by the time I was old I'd had three speeding tickets in two states, and one time I was actually speeding.

Anyway the shiny new school was third through sixth grades, and it was high tech for the day. Cafeteria had tables that folded up into the walls so it could be used as a gym when the kiddies weren't eating there. The benches folded up too, obviously. Schools being what they are, in the morning they ran us all through the cafeteria to get a glass of milk. Schools didn't do breakfast them, or dinner, just lunch. So we went through the milk line and they gave us each a glass of milk. And we had to drink it.

Intentions were no doubt good, milk is supposed to be good for you and maybe they figured some of the less well-off families didn't have their kids get a glass of milk in the morning so they were helping out. And they probably believed as many did that it was good for the kids. Health-wise.

There are not more than a couple of things food-wise that make me physically ill if I attempt to ingest or imbibe them. Bananas make me want to vomit and so does milk. So they're telling me to drink the milk and it's making me gag and I try to dissociate my person from the glass without getting caught and they're telling me drink your milk. It wasn't my milk. Maybe I could have drunk it all down and hurled all over the place, but how that would have gone I don't know. Finally I had Mom write me a note saying I couldn't drink milk and that took care of it. They never asked me why I didn't want to drink it, but teachers aren't very smart. Like cops, but which has the higher or lower collective IQ I haven't thought on much.

Third grade teacher was a nice younger one under thirty for sure, not sure how much under thirty. Since you have to go to college she'd be over twenty so it's a narrow range. First two had been old, fiftyish. Third grade was, well third grade. We read some more advanced books, Ranches and Rainbows was one I remember. Seems it was one of something called the Ginn Basic Readers, but I didn't know that them. I knew it just now when I Googled it. I remember being disappointed that only one story involved a ranch, a brother and sister about our age who lived on a ranch and had horses. I lived on a farm and we didn't have horses. We had tractors. A fellow who lived on a small place near us had a horse and plowed his garden with it but I can see a digression looming.

So the third grade was learning whatever reading and writing was appropriate for our age. And we went to the cafeteria with the tables and benches that folded up into the walls and it always smelled pretty bad, seemingly a mix of milk and whatever stuff they used to clean the place. We probably had some nuclear holocaust preparation, it was a little advanced for our age. I got it but most probably didn't. Get under the desk and wait until it's over, some things about living in a fallout shelter. The local radio station built a new transmitter facility about them, with a shelter that would hold a handful of people.

With JFK getting hosed the year before the Vietnam was was about to get going real good but we didn't know that. I sometimes wonder if as many of the teachers were communists.. I mean democrats then as now. Don't wonder very often though. By high school I could see most of them were. So the third grade went by without anything more memorable than Andy making the announcement about the Aztec human sacrifices. Wasn't show-and-tell, he just blurted it out in the middle of whatever class we were in.

Fourth grade teacher was a tall pretty young woman, single, had a red Chevy Impala convertible. With a phone. Come to think of it, fifty-something years later, why did a fourth-grade teacher in 1966 have a car phone? Maybe she was rich, or had a rich boyfriend. I can see that. The boyfriend part.

That was the first year we got the tests. The ones that you took for two days and had a lot of questions all kinds about all kinds of stuff. You used a number two pencil to color dots on the answer sheets, so they could be graded by machines. Advanced technolgy for the day. Later advanced technology, the kind I was exposed to when I was recruited for a programming school, included punched paper tapes which had been around since the eighteenth century. But I digress. Again. Okey-dokey.

My tests results were nineties on everything. All ninety-something. Well, I'd already incriminated myself in the first grade with the principal's watch so the kept an eye on me. Lessee, fourth grade. What else? Not much, it doesn't seem went to having home rooms until the next year, when we would have some classes with different teachers for some subjects. So the bell rings and you got five minutes to get to your next class and be in your seat, something bad would happen if you didn't. I believe with some teachers it was being swatted on arse with a paddle. The coaches did, later, believe it was the sixth grade. Liked to paddle they did. What was that about them as can't teach teach gym? Yeah. It was probably the fifth grade when I had my first encounter with those types.

Other than that fourth grade wasn't much different from the third, just I was a year older and so were the others. I probably had begun to recognize some of them as being the same ones that were in my class the year before, those that were. We were still just divided up into groups of thirty or so. More reading and writing and going to the lunchroom - that's what we called the cafeteria that had the fold up into the wall tables and benches - and going out to the school bus at three-thirty or whenever the last bell rang.

As I may or may not have mentioned earlier, I lived in the country. The small town that was my version of Peyton Place (I didn't know that yet) had a population of about five thousand, just shy of it as I recall. Those people were jammed into something under ten square miles. I know that because it has grown a good bit and is still under ten square miles. Dad's farm, the part he owned (he rented more land from other people to farm) was a square mile. A section they call it. He owned several smaller pieces, one to three hundred acres or so, not in the same place as what we called the home place. That was the place where the farmer and his family lived, usually had some barns and farm shop and stuff, sometimes had some of those big grain bins. That was where I lived, with Mom and Dad and their 4.0 kids - me and my little brother and our two big sisters. And a dog. That's where I lived in the country.

The school bus picked us up in the morning, early because we were right at fifteen miles from town. So it was about 0700... sorry, military came later, seven ayem when we walked over to the school bus. It was parked near our house because the bus driver lived across the field, on the little property I told you about, his father had a horse and plowed the garden with it. It was his son, that is the bus driver was the son of the old guy with the horse. Twenties I guess, he was in the National Guard and went to town every week for whatever they did, wore his uniform that day. Green fatigues, just like it would be later when I enlisted in the Air Force. Kids called him 'General' on account of the uniform. Kids. He was okay with it, did a good job, kids were pretty well-behaved then so bus driving was just a matter of picking up all the kids and getting them to school on time.

Worst thing that would happen was a kid would throw up. Didn't happen often but you pick up thirty-something kids that just had breakfast and the statistical probability will get you. One of them is not feeling good and breakfast didn't agree with him or her - seems like the throwupper was more often a girl - and... anyway there was a cannister of something the bus driver would sprinkle over the hapless breakfast remains and it smelled worse. Not a joke man.

Anyway General would come over and fire up the bus and off we would to to school, picking up the other kids along the way, drop off some at the elementary school (I was in that group) and taking the rest to the high school. That's junior high and high school, seventh through twelfth on that campus.

When summer came us country kids was out in the country, us farm kids on the farm, quite a few of us, others were kids of people that lived out there, some worked for the farmers and others worked at jobs somewhere, some in town. So we didn't see the city kids, went to town maybe once a week when Mom went to get groceries or do some farm business at the bank or accountant. That made me something of an outsider, when we got to the age where the kids were always talking about whatever went on in town or what the watched on TV last night or whatever I wasn't part of it. Fine with me, I played with whatever kids I fell in with at recess, two of those. Classes no challenge, just doing the going to school thing. Waiting to get home and if there was enough daylight play outside until dark.

So we wasn't part of the town society. I suppose some of the farm kids, the rich farm kids, were by the time we got to high school and they could drive to school and be in town all the time, and anyway the societal positioning wasn't as important when we were younger. We weren't especially rich, but not as poor as I sometimes thought. Mom was born on Black Thursday and so started out living in the Depression. Not that they had it so bad, being farm folks and being able to raise about all their food and besides not losing jobs or businesses they did all right. Dad was thirteen years older and his family was less prosperous, but by the time he went off to WWII he had a small farm, which his brother took care of while he was gone, and when he came back they expanded it. By the time we kids were born he had a decent operation. Not buying new tractors all the time or going in debt to grow he was in pretty good shape. But he and Mom were humble types and money didn't change them. I saw some people that did change when they got ahead, and it generally wasn't for the better.

A girl I knew, rode the school bus with, her Daddy was the same way. He was a thrifty type like my dad and she didn't put on like she was something special because her dad had a lot of land and money in the bank. Every three or four years he bought a couple of new pickup trucks and a family car (he mom died by the time she was a teenager) and paid cash. She was a sweet kid and liked me, all the way through high school, would have married me if I had my wits about me and asked her.

Being autistic caused me to misjudge a lot of things then. Of course I had no idea, Asperger's wasn't merged into the autistic spectrum until many years after I was an adult. I have some other symptoms, OCDs and difficulty socializing and such, and when I finally figured out what they were I began, with decent success, to suppress or conceal them from most people. But back then kids were mean to people that didn't fit in, and teachers weren't much good at dealing with it. Possibly my extraordinarily high intelligence saved me from being put in the retard class. Two older siblings with a similar record in shool probably helped out.

But some of the kids gave me hell, a teacher or two as well, especially the coaches, and the high-society kids gave me shit as we got older. Because they were under pressure to get good grades and had to study like crazy and I didn't. When the last bell rang I put my books in my locker and went home, if I was carrying books they were library books. I didn't make a big deal of it but some of the kids resented me because of it. But that was high school, and we aren't there yet.

Where in fact are we? Hmm,

Fourth grade, maybe third, one day some boys were pitching pennies in the boys room. It got back to the teachers and an investigation was conducted. Said investigation consisted of asking all the boys if they participated or knew anyone who did. I didn't know what it was, so I said no and didn't have any pennies anyway. When it was all over a couple hundred boys had confessed or been fingered by other boys. The sentence was, if I remember correctly, two licks. That's two smacks on the backside with a paddle. It was a pretty big affair, a couple hundred perpetrators being punished at once. They took them to the auditorium and up on the stage and one or more faculty members administered the prescribed blows.

Getting paddled was a joke for the boys, probably some confessed just for fun. But did any intelligent person believe there were that many perps? You got me. Maybe it was like the witch trials, and if someone was accused they had to do something. But how stupid can people be? Sorry, we're talking about teachers here. Some teachers enjoyed smacking little kids, and some of them may have gotten off on a mass punishment.

On the subject of corporal punishment, there was this fifth grade teacher, seemed a nice enough guy, Dad met him at the parent-teacher affairs and liked him, he liked me, but there was this one kid in my class that reminded me of Tom Sawyer. Not just the red hair and freckles but the mischievousness too. He was always in trouble for something. Well, one day he got paddled, the out in the hall smack-smack-smack, don't remember if it was two or three. It was usually two. Anyway Jimmy (that was boy's name) came back and a little bit later told some of his classmates "it did't hurt". Well, Mr. Prichard took him out and smacked him again, presumably harder. Jimmy repeated his previous assertions about the latest smacking. Mr. Prichard got wind of it and took Jimmy somewhere, maybe the principal's office. They were gone a while and when they came back Jimmy came in and sat quitely. Mr. Prichard asked "Jimmy, did that hurt?" Jimmy allowed that it did. I never had any respect for Mr. Prichard after that. Jimmy wasn't a bad sort, just a little rowdy. His family was well down the socio-economic scale, the type that don't start out with as much of a chance as some of us did. What they get they have to make for themselves and it's not easy. Mr. Prichard had no such excuse, whatever it was in his personality that made him get in a pissing contest with a child probably I didn't know. He eventually became an assistant principal and probably went further up the food chain but I didn't keep track. My most vivid memory (aside from the deal with Jimmy) was during history class. We were reading about the conquistadores, and Ponce de Leon was in there. He pronounced it Ponceedaylion. He and his wife got killed in a car wreck on the same road where the folks going to the dog show did. I didn't hear if they were drinking but guessed not.

What should he have done, you ask. He should have ignored it. Jimmy wasn't the first kid to say that after an arse-smacking, but Mr. Prichard let it get to him.

Sixth grade was not much different, I believe had two or three different teachers. One taught math, or tried to. Maybe it was the new math, that was a thing then, and I remember some elements of it. The teacher had difficulty getting the students to understand because she didn't get it. About five or six of us figured it out and taught the others, and what happened to teacher I never knew. Anyway for me and the top-level students it was always just a matter of reading the books and taking the tests.

At the end of the sixth grade we graduated, like a high school one only we were graduating to high school, or junior high. We practiced, singing songs like "This Land is Your Land", all of us in the cafeteria with the tables and benches folded up. On the big day our parents came and watched sing songs and go up and get our diplomas. Next year we would go over to the high school campus.

I reckon high school gets its own chapter.