Teaching My Class.

Abstract

read and write. Maybe earlier?I can remember trying to teach my baby sister how to crawl, and my younger brother how to dial the telephone. That my pretty flapper mother had taught eight grades concurrently as a one-room country schoolteacher did not escape my notice, even though she had hated the job because every day she had to chop wood for the school's potbellied stove and scrub its manure-caked floor and put up with the sass of the pupils bigger than she was, hulking on the back bench. That I grew up in a college town where my father was a chemistry professor was heaven on earth. There was lab glassware to be used as doll dishes. There were giant, dripping 5-cent ice cream cones from the college creamery to be devoured after our daily swimming lessons in the college pool. There were music lessons, piano first (I learned to read music before I learned to read words), then violin. There were enticing stacks of books to bring home from weekly trips to the university library. With a mixture of delight and trepidation I often tried to linger as long as possible in the children's room before they turned out the lights, in hopes that I might get locked in overnight and, undetected, could read the whole night through. But, ever obedient to the rules, I always wimped out when the austere librarian hissed, "Closing time." That we lived across a large field from the elementary school was a bonus. With the welcoming, red-brick Georgian building itself ever in my field of vision, what went on inside was perpetually on my mind. I loved to play school. As the oldest child of three in my family, I was a Lucy long before Peanuts immortalized this juvenile scold and nag. Before I began first grade I was so fearful that I'd misspell a word and flunk out that I asked my mother to teach me a hard word as a security blanket. She came up with a-n-t-i-c-i-p-a-t-e, which I memorized. Thus armed, I knew it all.