School Days
My grandson on the first day of kindergarten
This is the time of year where every other social media post is of kids going back to school, whether it's the first day of kindergarten like our youngest grandson or the first day of college like one of our older ones. This brings back memories not only of my own first day of school adventures but also twenty+ years of working in education. Today on the campus where I work a large contingent of international scholarship students made their way en masse to our office in the IT department to get help adding the inexpensive Android phones they'd brought from all over the world to our Wi-Fi network. I saw so many home screens and so many weather apps still set to Celsius. The students were unfailingly polite and I'm happy to work at a place that stresses diversity and cultivates internationalism.
I didn't go to college, so I don't have any stories to relate there, but I did attend a lot of schools during my public education and have some pretty good memories from a lot of them.
In today's book-banning climate, it's funny to me that I was reading Judy Blume books in the third grade in lower Alabama in the early 70s. A more conservative place has not been invented. I remember asking my Dad, in total innocence, what the word "masturbation" meant because it was in one of her books. He wanted to know where I'd heard that word and when I told him it was in my library book, to his "I voted for Nixon" credit, he did not go down to the school and demand that it be pulled off the shelf. Next time I had a question about a word, I went to the dictionary.
A couple of grades later, the US was spending a year getting ready for July 4, 1976, the bicentennial marking 200 years since our country was founded. (I know the Europeans are laughing at our youth). Every school kid in America was inundated for two semesters of school with a barrage of facts about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the Boston Massacre and the events of the Revolutionary War. The area where we lived had been settled during per-colonial times and one of the highlights of the period for me was going to a nearby reenactment of the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge which had been fought between American and British forces in February of 1776.
I went to several middle schools but the first one I attended was in New Bern, NC. My math teacher there was a graduate of Kent State University and six years prior to teaching us long division, on May 4, 1970, she had been marching against the war in Vietnam with her friends when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on them, killing four. She told us in granular detail what that felt like and nearly 50 years later I still remember feeling angry about it. I still am.
By the time I got to high school, my life had stabilized, and I was done moving around. I was grateful and it gave me a chance to dig into what school life offered and I played football, joined the drama club, made lifelong friends and did normal high school kid stuff. During my sophomore year (1980) the English department had a program for one week that mixed students from 10th, 11th and 12th grades to study the music and literature of the 1960s. We were encouraged to dress like we from that era and I took my old man's military fatigues (without asking) and drew a big peace sign on them and wore that. I remember learning the words to Blowing in the Wind by Bob Dylan taught to us by one of the senior girls who I then worshipped until she graduated.
I hope all the kids starting school this week get to form some good memories like I have. There are a lot of great teachers out there and if the politicians and administrators will leave them alone for five minutes, they'll rock those kid's worlds!
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