Second verse… same as the first.
My second grade teacher was not the kindly warm woman that my first grade teacher was. She was not an attractive woman. My memory of her was that she looked like Miss Gulch from the Wizard of Oz before she turned into the Wicked Witch of the West. That might be memory playing tricks on me but I’m sure it was close to the truth. She definitely expected unconditional respect like many teachers did in elementary school. And like many other teachers, she was quick to judge anything and assume students would blindly agree with her. More on that at the end of this post.
A good education is just around the corner
If you had to name a school after a besmirched president, Richard M. Nixon Elementary would be the best choice. Since my elementary school had been named long before Watergate and Nixon had not yet resigned in humilation, they chose the second worst president: Herbert Hoover. In my conservative and lily white town, the Depression had been caused by excessive government regulation (many would argue this today) and bums who played the stock market because they were too lazy to roll up their sleeves and do a hard day’s work. Why else would they have chosen Hoover?
My covert education continued
I of course did not stop learning outside of the classroom. It was the only way I could go to sleep feeling smart. I taught myself multiplication and I think I understood some division, but some third grade memories make me suspect that I didn’t quite have the hang of long division until I learned it in the classroom.
I do remember memorizing the multiplication table very quickly. Recently I’ve been trying to memorize the sixteen digit number on a new credit card. It took me a few months but I think I’ve got it. I was also able to see how multiplication was an extension of addition, like adding the same number over and over.
Among the dumbest playground arguments I ever got into (did I mention the kid who couldn’t read a watch and was sure I couldn’t either?), one was over multiplication. This kid didn’t know anything about it but I mentioned for some reason that any number times zero is zero. This kid called me an idiot and a liar. He knew that any number times any number was the original number. It just had to be because he only knew addition. Although addition also uses tables, its operation is more abstract. You’re not modifying a number with another number. You’re generating a third number from two other numbers. I sort of understood that at the time but my seven year old mind couldn’t find a way to explain it. I have no idea why I bothered kids with what must have been boring topics to them.
When I learned about computers years later, I recalled learning this concept of abstract operations as well as the ordered series of operations of multiplication.
I Pledge Allegiance to Things I Don’t Understand
The Pledge of Allegiance was serious stuff in the classroom. We did it every day. Why, I can’t remember. Do kids still do this? I’ll have to ask around.
At the time we were fighting godless Communists in Indochina. Hippies were burning draft cards and American flags. Some even suspected that our popular president may have had something to do with a third-rate burglary before the election. Surely now was the time to program children to love America by memorizing a few sentences and reciting them like robots. One kid next to me didn’t even say the words. He just made noises with his mouth during most of the syllables. Why wasn’t this kid sent to a reeducation camp before he grew up to become a Soviet agent?
And speaking of Nixon
Long before W. Bush started tinkering with daylight savings time, Nixon tried a similar thing when I was in the second grade. It was called the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973. Everything was an emergency back then.
I don’t think our president cared too much about the safety of kids going to school. My sister and I had always walked to school and it was always just light enough to be safe. Now it was so dark in the morning after Christmas vacation that my parents drove us to school so we wouldn’t get run over. Way to save energy, Dick. I also never understood how making us get up when it was colder and darker was supposed to save energy.
The school quickly resolved the problem by starting school an hour later.
Strange times during Easter
This one is so confusing I don’t know if I should include it but it does show how confusing things could be back then.
To the best of my recollection, we were told that the “Easter Bunny” was going to be delivering a package full of goodies to our classroom sometime during the day. I pictured someone showing up in a bunny suit or something. That makes sense, right?
Well it didn’t happen. Sometime during recess there was a report of a giant rabbit roaming the school delivering Easter candy. The playground was abuzz with excitement and we did what any group of kids would do in any kids’ adventure movie: we formed a posse to track down this giant rabbit. We quickly organized a hunting party and placed a kid on every wing indoors and outdoors to track him down. Unfortunately we had no luck. No one said they saw the rabbit again.
This seemed like it had just been some harmless fun until we told our second grade teacher about it. For reasons I’ll never know, she became furious at us as if we had ruined Easter for all the kids in the world. She said that the Easter Bunny had delivered a box full of candy to us but now we didn’t deserve any of it. She even held up a random cardboard box to make the punishment more painful although I don’t think there was any candy in that box (lying to your students is okay). I never understood what unwritten rules we had broken because she never told us what we did wrong or why she was so upset.
What do I think really happened? I don’t know but I can tell you what I hope had happened. Say that some idiot faculty member thought it would be fun to hop around school between classes in a bunny suit delivering boxes of candy to the classrooms. The kids would just love it! Then say that some tough bully saw that an adult in a cumbersome rabbit suit carrying a bag of candy was a very tempting target. I knew a couple of kids who wouldn’t have thought twice about jumping him and robbing him because they never thought twice about anything they did. The school always followed a policy of collective punishment whenever someone did something bad and no one snitched on who did it. The pieces fit.
I’ll always smile at the possibility that someone stumbled into the teacher’s lounge in a soiled and torn rabbit suit yelling, “They jumped me! The little goddamned bastards jumped me! Who? I don’t know who. I couldn’t see a damn thing with this rabbit mask on. Lucky for them. I’d pound the little shits if I knew who they were.”
Moving time
This would be my last year at Hoover. The incompetence of my parents really deserves its own blog, but this one sent us to a new school so it’s relevant. My dad who was a successful owner of three businesses had a great idea: sell our house. So we sold it. Then we had no place to live. We ended up living in a depressing apartment for several months while searching for another house. I don’t recall why Dad did this but my mom was so pissed about it that I felt it would be best not to ask. Other kids told me they knew it was their fault that their parents had divorced. I didn’t want to be one of those kids.
The Snowstorm that never arrived… like my parents
One day it was red alert time at Hoover Elementary. News arrived that a cataclysmic snowstorm was on its way to paralyze our town. Parents were summoned to the school to retrieve their children and take them to safety before it was too late.
Eventually the school had emptied and all the children were safe with their parents… except me and my sister. We were the last kids to leave the school and we didn’t leave with our parents. I don’t recall why they couldn’t find them. I guess my mom was out shopping before the snowstorm hit. I strongly suspect that my dad had had one of his daily three martini lunches and wouldn’t be sober enough to drive until he was ready to leave work. Whatever the reason, we sat and sat and sat in the principal’s office in an empty school. Finally they got ahold of one of our neighbors who would be willing to take us in until our parents turned up. The principal drove us there.
I felt like we were pretty low on our parents’ list of priorities that day. Even worse, there was not a flake of snow.
Most important lesson learned: don’t help other kids
Here’s the first experience in my life that I knew was totally unfair, unjustified, and proved to me that my teacher was terrible. After this she was just a fraud to me and I knew she cared nothing about what we were learning if anything.
During first grade we knew that soon we would be facing something that would be very difficult to learn: cursive writing. This was going to be harder than calculus and chemistry combined. Kids feared it. I suspected that just the thought of learning cursive writing made kids drop out of school.
Normally it was taught in the third grade but the importance of cursive writing was so critical to our educations that they moved it into second grade. As tough as it was going to be, we simply had to master this writing technique a year before other kids had.
Before I continue… what the fuck was the deal with cursive writing? It’s worthless! They said we’d be able to write so much faster by keeping our pencils and pens on the paper almost all the time while writing more complicated letters with curls and loops that regular characters didn’t have. A couple of years later we did a writing test in class and after two years of practice we all were able to print faster than write in cursive. A poll I took at work showed that no one could remember the cursive characters for all the capital letters. At least the metric system made sense (future post on that!).
Anyway, we started learning our cursive characters. The teacher would tell us what to write and we’d write it. I was in the front row with the other troublemakers next to a kid named Mark. He was one of those slow kids who couldn’t color within the lines last year. I looked at Mark’s paper and saw that he wasn’t just connecting the letters in the words, he was also connecting the words. His page was one long line!
I told him that you still put spaces between the words and showed him my paper so he could see how I was doing it. He said I was doing it wrong. As we argued over this, our teacher demanded to know why I was disrupting the class as if I had been having a loud conversation with myself. I asked a simple innocent question: “Do you connect the words together like you connect the letters in the words?”
I was not prepared for her venomous response. In her mind I had just been disrupting her instruction, and now I was wasting class time with a ridiculous question. She yelled (and I do mean yelled) at me a sarcastic monologue that went something like, “You have been writing for years! And now you ask this question! If you would pay attention for a change you might learn something and not look foolish in front of the entire class!” Kids laughed. I steamed because I knew I had this bitch.
I showed her my paper and said, yes, I had been paying attention and I knew you don’t connect the words. I pointed to Mark’s paper with its single illegible line and showed that he did not know this. I was trying to explain this to him and he didn’t believe me so I asked for your help.
I figured she realized she was in the wrong because she immediately ignored me and quietly told Mark that you put spaces in between the words. And that was it. She didn’t acknowledge that I was trying to help a fellow student. She didn’t scold Mark for not paying attention because she probably thought he wasn’t going to make it past second grade anyway. And I’m sure the thought of apologizing to a seven year old for a misunderstanding was more unthinkable to her than suicide. Teachers never apologized to kids under any circumstances. Kids are always wrong. Teachers are always right.
After that I never helped another kid in class. I didn’t understand why it was against the unwritten rules but I did not want to get yelled at again.
And the worst teachers were still a few years away.
Why do I remember this? 