As a teacher of teachers in a graduate school of education I spend a fair bit of my professional life deploring the present state of schooling in America. We read the national reports calling for reforms, shake our heads and add our own indictments in courses like “Education in Social and Political Context” or The Politics of Schools.” Simultaneously, in courses like “Human Growth and Development” or “Reading Methods” I encourage students to delve deeply into their own memories of childhood to understand the children they will be teaching. When I do my own assignment and review my elementary school experiences, schools today suddenly take on a much better profile. With one exception, my third grade school and teacher, the elementary schools I attended are poor models for any era.
The first words I learned to read were “board” and “health.” I remember spelling them out proudly for the doctor from the extra sign I was allowed to hang over my bed. I don’t remember being taught to read at all but I know that by the end of the year I was a reader. I used to hang over the upstairs register ( an iron grille in the floor inserted to allow heat from downstairs to penetrate upstairs) and read to my younger sister below from the book in her lap. We were separated in a vain attempt to keep us from giving the disease of the moment to the other.
Occasionally I ask my graduate students to recall how they learned to read and usually, though they do not remember any explicit instruction, they describe sitting on the lap of an adult mother, father, or grandparent and following along as a book was read aloud. Sometimes it is the same book over and over. We call this the lap method and my deduction from this unscientific bit of research is that when children have easy access to books and are surrounded by people who value reading and wish to share their pleasure, learning to read comes as naturally as learning to talk. However, among my bright articulate graduate students there are always some for whom reading did not come naturally. “I was always a minnow, never a shark,” as one student put it My assumption is that people learn differently and those who do not learn to read by sight and context have a hard time with the lap method. For these children there should be help with decoding skills so that they may enter literacy through another avenue. I was fortunate in being bom into a family where reading was a way of life, to be able to figure out reading through context, to be literally surrounded with books, and to have an eager audience for my early attempts at reading through the register. One of my daughters, however, raised with the same advantages, read very little until she was seven. But somewhere around the middle of second grade she went directly from being a non-reader to devouring The Secret Garden. I doubt she ever decoded; she just grabbed the meaning from the context, and a few known words. Her spelling, even now, supports my suspicions that she never learned to take words apart phonetically.
There is one other significant event from the first grade year I want to record. On one of those infrequent occasions when I went to school the teacher tried to teach us how to write the letters of the alphabet. I simply couldn’t figure out how to make an “e“. I tried all kinds of little circles with legs on them and I know the teacher struggled with me because I remember her impatience, but I simply couldn’t get it. Then one sunny day, standing in the kitchen by the door at the head of the cellar stairs, I was idly tracing designs on the rough wood frame with my finger. It’s interesting how clear the details of that discovery are with me still, and so is what I learned: not only how to make an “e” but that there is a special glory in what you discover for yourself. I’ve wondered since at the vividness of that memory; the sunlight, the place in our comfortable kitchen, the rough feel of the wood, and thought about how seldom we call on our kinesthetic and sensory powers to help us learn cognitive tasks.
I had a similar experience later with subtraction. I simply couldn’t figure out those those funny number problems, and, with forty children in the class, the teacher probably had little time to help me. But I brought my arithmetic book home for lunch – I think it was tomato soup – and I can still recall sitting beside my mother with the book between us explaining the problem to her, as it suddenly made sense. Again I felt a sort of miracle: the world suddenly becoming knowable and controllable. Perhaps from these moments I became a convinced believer in the inquiry method.
We were still in Winthrop when it was time for second grade . Winthrop’s year round population was primarily Irish Catholic and parochial schools were the preferred choice. Our public school therefore, was modeled after the principles of the authoritarian religious education of the times: children were naturally sinful and needed constant surveillance; we should be ruled by the rod and knowledge should be poured into our little heads whether it made sense to us or not. We were marched in and out of the building, up and down the stairs in those straight lines so aptly named crocodiles by the British. In the classroom our forty or so desks were bolted to the floor in serried rows.
The only thing I remember from second grade is recess. (How many parents, waiting eagerly at home for news about school have asked a child, “What did you do in school today?” and received the answer, “We had recess!” ) Our playground was the flat roof of the auditorium divided by a painted white line, boys on one side, girls on the other. Probably we were segregated in the classroom, too, though I don’t remember. We had no swings or teeter-totters, of course, just the rough asphalt, so we invented our own games. My favorite was the one in which three of four of us little girls linked arms and went skipping about the playground singing, “Anyone in my way gets a five cent kick,” at which point we’d raise our legs like chorus girls and deliver a lethal kick which never hit anyone.
By third grade my family had moved back to West Newton and on the first day of school I had a great shock. Our teacher’s name was Mrs. Moses! I knew only too well that teachers weren’t married! Although none of the teachers I’d known in Winthrop were nuns they had to live by a similar standard. In our own family history I knew the story of how my mother lost her first teaching job in a small Massachusetts mill town when the school board learned that she and my father had been secretly married in the spring. (One of the wedding guests leaked the news to the local paper.)
Mrs. Moses was only the first of many pleasant shocks in the third grade. There were half as many students in my class and the desks were arranged in little groups of four, almost like tables , with boys and girls mixed randomly together. I was awestruck! In my universe school met a strict segregation of the sexes, desks in rows, children in lines, a harsh silence in the classroom, and no decoration. Here we were in little groups, boys and girls together, and it was assumed we would chat with each other in a normal way. The classroom was light and airy and there were wonderful things to look at on the walls, maps, charts, and a great big Viking ship we waited on later.
That was the year when I started wearing glasses. At some point in the morning Mrs. Moses would call us up to her desk, one by one, to check our arithmetic. Just as she is the only teacher whose name I remember, she may be the only teacher who knew my name without consulting an attendance chart. If I got to her desk and had forgotten ray glasses she would say gently, “Now, what am I going to do with you. I might have to put you in the garbage can and put the lid on.” , and then she’d smile, or hug me, and I knew I was being teased. Teased by a teacher! It was heaven. I adored her. Once she sent me home to get my glasses as a gentle reminder, what we would call in these post-Dreikur’s days “a natural consequence.”
Walking to and from school and being out of school was as happy an event as being in schooL We all went home for lunch and I remember with great fondness wading through the autumn leaves, banging a stick-rat tat tat against an iron railing, or stepping in the icy footprints of the larger person who had gone before, and sometimes taking a new route which might make me late or get me lost but never did. I know now that developmentally it is around age eight that this pattern of personal exploration and enjoyment of nature occurs . For me, the habit of private exploration, a little dangerous but really safe, has remained with me all my life. There is the pleasurable thrill of trying something new, the familiar anxiety about getting it wrong, the sense of victory and pride in accomplishment of coming through safely and joy in the new knowledge, which opens up yet new worlds to explore.
I was living in an era and a place where children went home for lunch because there was a mother waiting there with hot tomato soup. I could even, apparently, be sent home by myself during the day to fetch something forgotten. Furthermore, we had no school on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and only recently, when I was visiting a model school in England, I found out why. In England, we were talking about model approaches to staff development and our British expert described the schools in Newton where, under Dewey’s influence, children were sent home early two afternoons a week so that teachers could have planning time. As the British expert talked about integrated curricula, project work and thematic education another piece of third grade came back to me. The Vikings! We must have studied Vikings for a long time. I know we read about Vikings, and wrote about them – for the first time in my school career I was asked to write something on my own! – and eventually we composed a play about the Vikings and put it on. I particularly remember painting wonderful sea and mountain backdrops. I remember reading endlessly about the Vikings, and not in the basal reader! Mrs Moses read Norse myths to us and we talked about what we heard in them. On the playground, left to our own devices, we clambered in and out of imaginary seafaring vessels, swords in hand, to attack sea monsters, or hostile natives. Thus, without realizing it I was introduced to an integrated day philosophy and thematic curriculum at age 10.
Clearly the teacher was more of a person and an influence, and the curriculum more relevant and instructional than anything else I had experienced before or would again in elementary schooL The interpersonal dynamics of the classroom were equally liberating. There was a boy in my desk group called Jimmy for whom I felt a more than ordinary interest. One day in the fall a group of us were chasing each other on the playground and Jimmy inadvertently bumped into me. (No separation of the sexes here.) I fell down and skinned my knee and was led, snivelling, into the principal’s office. There the principal, the great man himself, got down on his knees to wash and bandage the wound. Probably to take my mind off my misery, he asked me what happened. “Jimmy pushed me,” I sobbed, “Well,” he said in a matter of fact tone of voice, “Why didn’t you push him back?” I was stopped in my tracks. No adult had ever suggested such an outrageous idea to me before. Furthermore, he didn’t understand that I was much too fond of Jimmy to have any interest in revenge. At any rate I stopped snivelling.
The fourth grade took us back to Winthrop again, and back to being seen, not heard, with long rows of desks and segregated playgrounds. We had art twice that year. On the first occasion a teacher I had never seen before came to the class just before Christmas, drew a red bow on the board and commanded us all to copy it The second time she came, in March, she brought a mimeographed pictures of a little girl with an umbrella and we were given crayons – the only time I ever saw crayons out of the halcyon environment of Mrs. Moses third grade. I remember this clearly because I colored mine yellow and didn’t like it so I colored over it with blue and the result was a rather greenish girl in a greenish rain. She hung mine on the board to show how you could make green by combining blue and yellow, not at all what I had in mind, but I was very proud of the recognition.
My fifth grade year began in a one room school in New Hampshire, but when we returned to Massachusetts a few months later, it was to a rented house in Hopkinton, famous as the starting place for the Boston marathon. Our other houses had been sold: money problems were increasing and the stability of my parent’s marriage decreasing.
I don’t remember the school in Hopkinton but I can still see the classroom: a box of a room, one wall bordering the corridor; the opposite wall facing out; high windows set over hissing radiators,- eager to bum in the winter time-; coat closets in the back to hold winter coats and recalcitrant children; the teacher’s desk in front and our desks, almost fifty of them, reaching back in five long rows. I was a “w” even then so I was near the back of the last row. Reading must have taken over a hour. We all took out our basal reader, and the teacher called on each of us in turn to read a paragraph, moving methodically up one row and down the next. When I think of the range of ability in that fifth grade room it must have been excruciating for both the able and the less able.. I blotted it out by reading and rereading the basal, and anything else I could smuggle in, under my desk while she worked her way laboriously around the room. Unfortunately, this meant that when it was my turn to read I had no idea where we were in the book . I would stumble around, cringe and act flustered until in exasperation she would bark at me to sit down and moved on to the next victim. Of course my grades were always F, to the surprise of my parents who were constantly taking books away from me and urging me to go outside to play. Near the end of fifth grade we were given a standardized reading test my first and I felt malicious pleasure at the teacher’s discomfiture when I was recorded with a ninth grade reading level.
The worst moment that year, perhaps in all my school experience, occured when the music teacher came in to get us ready for a Memorial Day program. She made each of stand by our desks, one by one, and sing the scale: do, re, mi, fa,so,la,te, do. I was terrified. When it came my turn I had only quaked and wavered through the first three notes when she snapped, “Good gracious, you sing like a frog. Just move your mouth during the performance; don’t try to sing.” I’ve found it very hard to sing in public ever since.
It was 1941 when I started sixth grade. The country was at war, my parents were separated, and my mother tried to get a teaching job again. Headlines screamed “teacher shortage” but no school would hire her because she was now a divorced woman. Ironically, once-married teachers were as unacceptable as married teachers in most of Massachusetts. Finally my mother found a job at a small boarding school near the Cape where the three of us could live together. The Arnold School was so idyosyncratic that to describe those experiences would take me away from any pretense at common history, though one sequence:of my life and hard times as a math student may make some contribution to this personalized history of education in the thirties and forties.
Because I had been doing badly in math when we went to The Arnold School I was “put back”, which meant doing the fourth grade workbook again, pages and pages of straight computation; twenty problems to a page, alternate pages for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division but not one word of English in the lot. I worked my way painfully through the fourth grade workbook in the winter of my sixth grade year with no instructions and making many mistakes out of boredom, all of which had to be redone, and was driven through the fifth grade workbook in the summer. In the seventh grade I did the sixth grade workbook, and at that rate I might eventually have caught up with myself, and the class, and received some instruction. But instead I was skipped into ninth grade, and moved immediately into algebra which I liked quite a bit and did fairly well. Computation skills seemed much less important and I enjoyed the leap of faith which moving all those little letters and parenthesis around seemed to require. However, I never learned anything about square roots, decimals, percentages or compound fractions because, in the standard sequence of things they were reserved for the eight grade, which I skipped.. As a result I have suffered all my life from a lack of skill with most practical math and have suffered even more from the image I gained of myself as stupid and incompetent with figures.
What does my story have to say? Several things and perhaps more than I know. For one, it shows how much progress there has been in educational practice, at least in the elementary school, in the last fifty years. I doubt if any teacher is still conducting reading around the room sessions, and certainly not in classrooms of fifty. I doubt that art and music are limited to one or two forays from the specialist teacher, nor that the instruction in art and music can be such a travesty of the disciplines. I doubt that math instruction is limited to the four processes of computation for the first six years and is taught only by paper drills. I know certainly that schools no longer separate the sexes from each other, and very few classrooms have forty or fifty children in them.
The changes in the teaching of reading, for instance, are striking. It is now commonplace to have small group instruction in reading and students in the same class reading on different levels, even if still in basal readers, and that too is fast disappearing in favor of literature-based and whole language programs. The emphasis now is firmly on reading for understanding as well as on learning to decode, with the understanding that some children learn best with some method, some with another and most with a systematic combination.
The teaching of math is also strikingly different. I finally did learn something about math, and at least stopped counting on my fingers, when I had to teach math to third graders in the ’70s. We used the Rasmussen books and “new math” and for the first time I understood some of the basic concepts behind computation. For example, watching my third graders figure out their ages in months I discovered that multiplication is simply an economical version of addition. The current acceptance of concrete experiences in math, and of using manipulatives which can be anything from quisinaire rods to lima beans would have made a very great difference in my understanding of math and my attitude toward myself.
But although almost all schools are better than most of those I attended, very few schools have managed to provide the sense of liberation, the real excitement for learning that I found in the third grade in West Newton. I learned about the Vikings; I even learned how to do those computation exercises which I then had to practice for the succeeding three years. Even more, I learned that teachers can be warm, friendly and trustworthy, and I learned how to work and play with other children. I learned that it is all right to speak up or to speak out; to be yourself. In Newton, in the thirties, the public schools were governed by an appreciation for the individual, an understanding and honoring of childhood, an integration of subject matter and skills, all leavened with a kindness and good humor many children never experience even today in their elementary education.
My story is also a story about women in the educational system; women who couldn’t teach because they were married, and then couldn’t teach because they were divorced; women whose professional competence was determined not by their work in the classroom but by their relationship to a man. It is a story of boys and girls kept apart from each other and of girls, at least ,who were expected to be silent and docile.
What the story says for me is how much the child is daughter to the woman. So much of what I was then I still am. One of the great rewards of autobiography is the opportunity it affords for seeing oneself reflected back through the mirrors of memory. When I think of myself as I know myself now, and find in my memories an image of the person I was then the two perceptions merge to make a third person, like successive versions of the Russian doll, each hidden within the next larger one. To some extent the writing of these memoirs has enabled me to unpack the dolls and to put them back together again. I use this process for helping teachers to find in their own lives, in their own school experiences, the insights and empathy which can help them to play Mrs. Moses to other Jimmys and Heidis.
Finally, for educators everywhere, this story serves as a reminder that when all the years of schooling are done and all the books put away, we may or may not be able to read Shakespeare or find a square root but what we will remember most clearly are the moments of cruelty and kindness, the times we have felt understood, and the discoveries we have made for ourselves.
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(This essay was originally published in “Teaching and Learning Magazine”, a publication of the University of North Dakota in 1984)
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