St. Clair County Schools

St. Clair County Courier
24 June 1976

Fifty-Six Years In The Classroom
By Flo Summers 

I can’t personally cover America’s educational twistings and turnings throughout the entire Bicentennial; however, I can vouch for more than a quarter of those years, for I was there. I spent fifty-six years in the classroom.

It all began on a September day in 1912 when I marched proudly to my double desk with a full inkwell in a one-room school located in a mid-Missouri village. When the teacher called the roll, my brother, a fourth grader, vowed I answered “President” instead of the proper “Present”. My father excused me by saying “President” was familiar to me because of his barnstorming all summer for Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party. It could be I was preoccupied with guarding my ink supply. What else could a six-year old do with an open inkwell except guard it, or, perhaps, decorate the general area?

The school room was crowded with two and sometimes three sharing a seat. We were just as eager or just as reluctant as children are want to be in any age or under any circumstances. We generally loved, or at least respected, our teachers and feared our parents. We did our lessons mainly because adults said we must. There really wasn’t anything else to do except get into mischief which was vigorously frowned upon by society in general. If we were plagued by the swarms of sluggish flies feasting on our bare legs on those warm fall days or by those drooling over our lunch buckets lining a rear wall, we didn’t show our annoyance. We merely swished them away. Even the slurping of water drunk from an all-school dipper which dangled from an open water pail didn’t disturb us. We knew no better way. We recited in unison the ABC’s written on the blackboard and copied them along with our numbers until we learned them. We chanted words from an enormous chart which rested on a tripod and flipped over another sheet of words and sentences when we were ready. We rarely missed a day of school.

Under the guidance of a young woman who, after having completed the eighth grade, had passed the county-teacher examination, I was soon reading, counting, and doing a little writing. Fortunately she immediately introduced me to a sizeable library of children’s stories. Her reading of a child’s version of Longfellow’s Hiawatha brought anguished tears as I suffered through the cold, hungry winter with Minnehaha. Soon I thrilled to the escapades of Bow Wow and Mew Mew and to other childish encounters as I did my own reading. In the absence of visual aids, educational toys and games, and other present day gimmicks to attract children, I had books. I read them. I fail to understand why so many bright children today can’t, don’t or won’t read. Are there too many distractions at school and too much television at home? I was motivated to read at school for we had few books at home. Certainly reading was my life, my liberty, and my pursuit of happiness!

Shamefully I spent two years in the fourth grade – not because of my dullness but because of the stupidity of a school board who declared after five months that school was over and that no one could pass. They said that funds had run out – they paid the teacher only twenty dollars a month – but surely the board could have found a way to continue if they themselves had had more than a fourth-grade education. Comparatively are board members any better fitted today? How concerned are Americans to elect qualified men and women to manage schools?

As an eighth grader I figure I had exactly seven minutes a day of my teacher’s time, leaving her the rest of the day to deal with the other fifty-four. And on some days the school cut-ups cheated me out of that puny pittance. Somehow I learned in spite of inept teaching, poverty-stricken programs, and crowded conditions. Scanning most of my lessons in record time – mostly ignoring arithmetic – I readily got on with my reading of numerous paper back classics. Romanticizing over Longfellow’s “Evangeline”, Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” and Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face” rendered me oblivious to all extraneous matters even unto the third and fourth readings. Today’s eighth graders – and they are legion – who do not now these and similar stories are much the poorer. My sentimentality and love of dramatics won me the privilege of emoting Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” at my elementary graduation. I never determined if my reading or my new salmon-pink crepe de chine dress stunned the audience. At any rate, the program, created and delivered by our class, gave us a chance to jar open the door of the adult world and peep in. Hopefully today’s young grads have the same opportunities to bolster their sense of pride and importance.

In 1920 the door cracked a bit wider as, joined by twenty-four other raw recruits from my class and from neighboring schools, I began the State Course of Study as outlined for ninth and tenth graders for a Job High School. The teacher, an old and worn gentleman, had something to offer. I suspect he knew little about the science of teaching, but he had an intriguing love of books and of words that captivated me. Taking math and science lightly – in fact, almost missing them completely – he taught us history and read the great classics to his combined classes in this one-room school. Often reading in a dull monotone right after lunch, he nodded and dozed sometimes jerking awake when his book hit the floor. Most of the kids were asleep too, so it didn’t matter. Neither such a hilarious incident nor his expressionless droning diminished Shakespeare, Dickens, or Hugo for me. When he offered a prize to the ninth grader who listed the most new words and their meanings, I set out to win it. Of course, such an honor carried with it the title “Walking Encyclopedia”, but I didn’t mind, for my words were memorized to be used, and use them I did, letting each honeyed word ooze and drip off my tongue. Love of words and love of learning can be caught from teachers who love words and learning.

I completed high school in 1925 in the county seat ten miles away. My first love was English followed closely by Latin and History. The cramped economy of my farm family eased me into Teacher Training since teaching was one of the few careers possible for girls. I breezed through the training, ignoring arithmetic, of course, and qualified for rural teaching. And I got a school – quite a feat in the face of rugged competition for the few jobs available. Desperate practices of kick backs and other little Watergate tricks were often used to secure or to hold teaching positions. Such tactics accelerated during the Great Depression when having a job became a life or death matter. When I presented my “confidential” flowery To Whom It May Concern from my teacher Training Instructor, the school board took one look and hired me on the spot. More effective private recommendations were to soon supplant the non-private type I carried that day. Today the pendulum may swing back if voices that now urge the opening of all files to the public become more persistent. I fear recommendations will again become as meaningless as the one I proffered.

In the fall of 1925 I entered a remote classroom to be a teacher, janitor, and playmate to thirty-six children in grades 1 through 8. Two tall boys only a year younger than their bold young teacher might have caused trouble, but they didn’t. I outwitted them inside and out ran them on the playground. I offered my students loving concern. I played with them, and, introducing a few changes in their drab lives, I struggled to transfer my love of reading. It wasn’t easy for a library was non-existent – reading only text books is sheer dullness. There were few pictures and no encyclopedias in this underprivileged school. Neither was there a county library to draw from. I shared the few books I owned and borrowed others. We were almost reduced to Horace Mann’s one log and one teacher – or was it Plato’s? Only I had a logful of eager students!

One day during a study time we heard a strange muffled rumble. As the sound grew louder an alert youngster whispered excitedly, “It’s an airplane!” Trooping outside, we watched the small craft soar far above our heads. We had now actually seen an airplane! Wonder of wonders! Some of the pupils had never even seen a train which explains why place geography was almost totally lost on them. One day while introducing a unit on Africa to my fourth graders, I located this vast continent on a globe. When I showed them where they lived in Missouri and how they would travel to get to Africa, a little girl chirped, “Teacher, I’ve been there. My mother took me when I was a baby.” My tolerant smile plainly indicated disbelief, as she heatedly insisted. I said quietly, “All right, dear, just ask your mother tonight.” Entering the room the next morning, she beamed. “Oh, Teacher, that wasn’t Africa where we went. It was Appleton City.” A town twenty miles away was as remote as Africa to her – the big round globe and the Atlantic Ocean not withstanding.

After two years I moved into my own village school to teach grades 5 through 8. A married woman now, I was plain lucky to get the job, for marriage seemed to give questionable status to a woman, immediately rendering her unfit to teach regardless of all past successes. Shades of woman’s unliberation! Rural gossip had it that “She surely had a pull.” Housed in an imposing two-story over-crowded combination grade-high school, I held forth in a room too small to lick (or pet) the proverbial cat. And we partitioned a card-boarded 3x5 corner of that small space to prepare and serve hot lunches, the end result of a 4-H club project. Each day a different mother sent a single item of food to be cooked and served to the twenty hungry kids. I cooked, I served, I did a little teaching on the side line. I never knew turnips could taste so good. Seasoning can do wonders, and if one is hungry enough – and we were – they are delectable day after day and week after week. Not long ago I met a former student who now owns an impressive restaurant chain where, incidentally, no turnips are served. He vowed his blood was 98% turnip juice during those Turnip Days. After serving ten years in rural schools where I often did demonstration teaching before area groups, I moved on to greener pastures.

My husband joined the State Department of Education in the Capitol city in 1943. We had barely settled when the city superintendent called to inquire if I would finish the term for – you guessed it – an eighth grade math teacher who had walked out leaving them high and dry. We were at war and teachers were scarce. They could make more money in defense plants. I have admitted no great ability, interest, or training in math, but I took the job after being granted a special certificate. I did my homework keeping far ahead of the kids. I drew up creative lesson plans, I sold the most victory stamps for the war effort. I became president of the local teacher’s association, and I generally found favor with the administration. I stayed ten years in junior high. I was, however, transferred to the English Department after the first year.

I then moved to senior high where I taught three accelerated American Literature classes, one journalism, and one remedial English class. My exhilaration form teaching the fast learners was tempered by the often comically painful challenges of teaching the slow ones. One remedial wrestled with the word “solemn”. His dictionary told him the word meant “grave” so he wrote “They lowered her body into the solemn.” Such students need patient help. As I tried to teach them, I struggled against becoming emotionally involved with them. Our priority is teaching. We cannot be all things to all students. In today’s crowded schools, counselors are equipped to guide the emotional development of youth. I did not spare the educational rod: I got what I expected. And I expected a great deal. I expected my students to adjust to me as I attempted to adjust to them. Learning is a two-way street. And they learned to write. I didn’t spend every waking hour grading their efforts. With careful planning and guidance they were taught to check each other’s work. No paper could come to me until the student had first read it aloud, corrected it, asked a second person in or out of the group it read it, corrected it again, if necessary – I scarcely ever demanded it be completely rewritten, a discouraging practice which turns students off. I believe – and assured himself it was ready for my inspection. I became adept at scanning papers and writing brief evaluations. What is this I hear of today’s youth who cannot write simple sentences or paragraphs? Is the classroom of the 70’s too frustrating for teachers?

I finished the last seven years of my career in a college classroom where I cajoled reluctant freshmen to learn the simple rudiments of their language. The former all-black college had become fifty percent white in 1961. Many of the untutored whites came from local areas. Their training was no better than that of the ghetto blacks. Since the 1960’s degenerated into the Decade of the Great Protest, mine was as much a selling as a teaching assignment. Only God knows if my efforts paid off. I worked hard and did a lot of praying – perhaps the best preparation after all when facing negative, listless students.

Some say that reading and writing are becoming lost arts. If this is true then the blame must lie largely on poor teaching and poor attitudes. The permissive teacher concern to spare students the tedium of mastering the disciplines of grammar and expression and the popular student philosophy of “doing my own easy thing” are taking a sad toll. Ignorance of our native tongue cannot be excused.

George Orwell said: “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” May God – and the educational system of America – forbid!