District 30

I really liked learning - still do - except for art class, a subject I abhorred, and which, at an hour a week, was allocated altogether too much time in my view. District 30 was an elementary school, which then meant grades 1-8 and drew about 80 students from roughly a five-mile radius of town. Many of the students lived on farms and road a bus to school, but by cutting through Gust & Tina’s yard, I had but a 2 minute walk.

The two-story red brick structure with a bell tower on the roof and a wide staircase to the second floor - with a banister well-worn by generations of seat bottoms - was operated by a staff of 4 teachers, janitor and a cook. The school had four large classrooms with each teacher responsible for 2 grades and all subject matter. The building had a terrifying fire escape that exited from the 2nd floor 7th & 8th grade room and traveled down the outside wall.  I hated fire drills.  

Each of the four rooms held around 20 students from 2 grades, seated in rows of desks that were bolted to wooden rails to make it easy for the janitor to move around, and also appealing the the teacher’s sense of order.  [Note:  the desks in the photo with the flip-tops were a much later introduction. The row on the right was the norm.] Blackboards were black and chalk was white. The alphabetical order seating was soon altered to address talkative girls, spitballing boys and myopic kids of either gender.  Bathrooms were in the dingy basement next to the coal chute.

Each day began with the pledge of allegiance and continued with the basics: penmanship (Palmer method), spelling, phonics& grammar, math drills at the blackboard, American history, geography, reading, sentence diagramming and once week current affairs from the Weekly Reader.

Kindergarten had not yet made its appearance in District 30, perhaps too much a German idea to tolerate.  But the 1st & 2nd graders had woven rugs for a 15 minute “rest time” after recess.  I always suspected the rest time was for the teacher. The rugs were stored in the cloakroom along with the sweaty jackets and dripping overshoes.  

There wasn’t much budget for anything beyond books so science class required some creativity by the teacher. Demonstrating wave behavior tapping a smoke-filled Quaker oatmeal box with a hole in the top.  Fossils someone brought for show-and-tell. Chemistry with bleach and vinegar. Optics via a prism casting a rainbow on the wall.  Altogether too little time on these things.

The school “library” was a tiny room on the 2nd floor with a pathetic selection of books, but it did have a series of biographies of American historical figures: Patrick Henry, Francis Marion, JEB Stuart, George Washington Carver, Kit Carson, Thomas Edison ...  The focus of the series was tilted toward presidents, war heroes and the application of manifest destiny. But I devoured them all. I could not get my hands on enough books.

I thought diagramming sentences was great sport – I suspect the only such person in the school, including the teachers.  There was something immensely satisfying about breaking a complicated sentence into that map of subject, verb, prepositional and participle phrases and seeing it cover a blackboard.  It was like revealing the secrets of darkest Africa, making me falsely assume that perseverance and decomposition could solve any difficult problem.

And, I enjoyed spelling, another minority opinion. So many words out of just 26 letters. The week’s 20 spelling words were issued on Monday and on tested on Friday. I can still hear the cadence of the spelling test.  

“Predict”.

“Can you predict the election winner?”

“Predict”.  

“Cancelled”.  

“School was cancelled due to the blizzard.” (By the way - that almost never happened)

(cheering)

(shh).

“Cancelled.”

Every month or so we would line the walls for a spelling bee with the last one standing getting bragging rights.  I went down in flames with “cheif” - that mis-application of the “i before e except after c” rule.  My version still looks right to me after all these years.

The worst day of the school year was Valentine’s day.  We were required to give a valentine to everyone in the class and trying to find the right message for each person (i.e. the girls) was agony.  And the choices came from the paltry pack of 25 paste-boards from McIver’s store that I had to split with my sister.  It was my first lesson in the myriad of mis-interpretations the English language can produce.

The school cook was Olga and what a cook she was.  Most schools field endless complaints over the lunch offerings, but not us.  She could work miracles with that USDA supplied fare. A choice duty was to be one of the lunchroom helpers – a chance to get out of class ½ hour early (hopefully art class) and cross over to the lunchroom to help prepare for the lunch rush. The lunchroom was a separate building a short distance to the west that resembled boot camp housing. Buttering bread and scraping dishes was about as much that could be entrusted to the student helpers.

Of course, recess was the highlight of the school day. The school was surrounded with a large open space and playground equipment, consisting of 2 large sets of swings, H-Bar, a teeter totter that once held my tongue on a cold winter day, a way-to-tall slide, a softball field and a dirt basketball court on the south end of the playground - next to the mayor’s house.  There was, of course, no P-E teacher, so recess was self organized.  Weather permitting, I lobbied for a baseball game. The baseball/softball field had a real screen backstop, but right field bordered the highway which sloped steeply downhill to the south.  If you hit it there you were automatically out and you had to fetch the ball - more on baseball in a later episode. So depending on the mood or the weather; football, basketball, tag, snowball fights, kick-ball, marbles, hide-and-seek, jump rope, Simon Says, Captain-May-I, hopscotch (girls only) or just running laps around the school won the day.

But recess wasn’t always fun and games.  Once, on the occasion of someone’s birthday, each kid got a balloon.  Outside, __’s balloon popped and I somehow was charged with the offense. (I plead innocent to this day.)  In any case, __ organized the entire class to hunt me down and punish me. The next day it was as if it had never happened.  But, of course, it had.  My first experience with injustice.  Later, the Gulf of Tonkin and WMD’s echoed this little incident to me - albeit those events had far more dire consequences than a bruised 10 year old.

In the spring, a whole day was allocated to grounds maintenance work.  Everyone was thrilled with a day off from school, but I considered it indentured servitude.  Give me a mess of math problems any day.  Every kid in the school (maybe not grades 1-2) brought a rake and the day was spent picking trash & raking both the school grounds and the skating rink up the street.  I could not imagine a worse way to spend a day.  And, each Spring, District 30 hosted a “field day” with kids from Farwell bussed in for contests of athletic skill of the running , jumping, throwing sort - primitive track and field. Never did too well. Too scrawny.

District 30 was not the Fields of Eton, but the teachers were caring and provided sound individual attention. I suppose it was pretty primitive, but I moved to the big high school quite well prepared academically. 

Socially - not so much.