My (Relatively) Placid School Years

Adams Elementary School
Enid, Oklahoma

I began Kindergarten in Enid, Oklahoma, in the fall of 1949 (Mrs. Dugan!) and graduated from Hiram High School (Hiram, Ohio) in June 1962. And, for the most part, I had a fairly placid time.

There were exceptions: harassment by bullies (D. McDonald, I’m talking about you), guilt about not getting my work done (I learned to deal with that guilt quite well, thank you), a broken heart now and then.

Here's the first of those I remember. Back at Adams School (fifth or sixth grade) we learned square dancing. I was decent (no more than that, believe me), but, somehow, I was chosen to be in a group that would perform for parents. So there we were: four girls, four boys. One of those girls, Linda, had a pretty sizable apartment in my heart.

The teacher told the girls to pick their partners (not a bad idea--no fights broke out), but when it came time for Linda's pick (my memory is that she went first), she picked ... the New Kid, a boy whose name I have long suppressed, a boy who'd been in the school only a few weeks.

My heart shattered like a fragile wine glass and clattered to the floor with a sound that must have awakened people in different time zones.

But everyone in that Adams room that day pretended they didn't hear.

Another traumatic event in my elementary years: going to see the many rattlesnakes held in cages at nearby Phillips University (only a block or so away), snakes that had been captured during the state's annual rattlesnake roundup. We marched by the cages, which were very close to us, while the snakes coiled and rattled and leapt toward us, banging their heads into the wire-mesh doors. I think I died a half-dozen times that day.

But the worst thing? We had periodic atomic-bomb drills. We would crouch under our desks, fold our arms over our heads--a certain survival technique--and think about those Soviets that just might attack us here in Enid. Scared the hell out of me.

Later on I became a teacher myself, and for most of my career, all we had were occasional fire drills. Later, we added tornado drills, and seeing the kids coil their arms over their heads reminded me of A-bombs.

By the end of my career, though (June 2011), we were having mass-shooting drills. Locking doors, crouching in classrooms, staying out of sight, remaining silent, waiting for the all-clear. I could tell that a number of the kids were terrified--in a rattlesnake-cage sort of way.

Now, we have grandsons who are in school (one in fifth grade, one in ninth), and they have had to deal with some horrifying things--not just the school-shooting drills but this current COVID-19 situation. Distance learning. Missing their friends and, yes, their teachers.

But other horrors have existed for them, too--and I use the word horrors seriously here. The horrors of continual standardized testing. I've written here before that both our grandsons have taken more standardized tests already than I did, K-Ph.D.

These tests, in my view, have had many deleterious effects: the tension and pressure on young students, the narrowing of the curriculum (teach what's on the test!), the handcuffing of teachers to some rigid (and fairly arbitrary) standards. I think of some of the most wonderful teachers I ever knew (as a student, as a colleague), and I cannot imagine them marching lock-step through a prescribed curriculum. It would be like cutting off the leg of an Olympic gymnast.

Oh, and I should not neglect the rise of social media--and how easy it has become to bully in so many different ways now. When I was in school, bullies knocked the books out of my arms--or punched me in the upper arm--or muttered dire threats as they passed me in the halls.

But now? Bullying spreads online like--like--well, like a virus.