ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

Older educators recognize the differences and similarities between past and present school classrooms. Learning and teaching technologies may change, but much is the same. My formal schooling began three months before Pearl Harbor and World War II. Although my mother attended kindergarten in Massachusetts in 1912, Clinton, Maine, had no early education opportunities. However, I had a grandmother, an aunt, and a mother who had been schoolteachers. My grandfather read the comics to me everyday. I knew a lot by age six, including how to read. I also remember my terrified anticipation of first grade! Somehow, my child’s mind translated adult descriptions of school as severely regimented. You could breathe, but not speak! Raising your hand to talk became a liberating concept!

Seats in the classroom were screwed to the floor in rows with tops that opened for book storage and holes for inkwells for right-handed writers. In third grade, we graduated to fountain pens filled from little bottles of Waterman or Schaeffer’s ink that never fit the inkwell. A little lever in the pen drew in the ink that invariably stained fingers and sometimes clothing. Ballpoint pens were an early experience in changing technologies.

Blackboards were black, some still made of slate. Chalk came in wooden boxes with sliding covers and packed in sawdust to minimize breakage. Erasers full of chalk dust were taken outside and clapped together to reduce (never eliminate) dust. On Fridays, older children washed the half of the blackboard they could reach. Markers on white boards produce words and pictures, but lack the visceral experience.

Recess, today’s major advocacy effort, created groups of children who chose their games. Boys and girls often played separately, except for marbles in the spring when skill trumped gender. Children learned and taught childhood games, learned to take turns, to lose and win gracefully (usually), and to exercise. We ran from the dodge ball, jumped rope, played tag, and drew hopscotch grids in the dirt, always searching for the perfect, flat stone that would stay inside the lines. In the spring, everyone with marbles played to win or lose. Our school’s back door had a metal mat to scrape off dirt from incoming shoes. We turned the mat into a game of skill, tossing marbles to get them in a hole in the mat close to the back wall. The closest marble won.

To be continued, because education never ends.

Contributed by Edna Ranck

And, the Winners Are...

The winners of the latest "Tell-a-Friend about ExchangeEveryDay" contest are:

1. Silvana from Education Encore, LaSalle, Quebec, Canada

2. Louise Bishell from Northern Territories, Australia

3. Julia Kolouch, Learning Care Group, Escondido, California

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