School Days
Sat., October 5, 11:37 AM
Miss King was my sixth grade teacher. She and her friend, Miss Deyo, were the quintessential WASP schoolteachers. They were pretty old; they weren’t that young when they had taught my dad. So you have to understand, when they introduced innovations to their classes, it was really a stretch. Miss Deyo taught third grade, and I will always remember her because she introduced me to science. There were no science texts for kids; she read science to us every morning. (Someone missed a question of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and I thought, “I’ve known that since I was eight years old!”)
I remember two things about Miss King. The first was to enjoy math problems. They became an exercise in logic – look for the hidden question, for example – and the methods I learned became part of my permanent thinking process (even if I didn’t know that at the time).
But what I remember best about Miss King was her reading shelf. This was fifty years ago, and no one had such things as “enrichment materials.” Miss King was also assistant principal, and she worked on her administrative papers while we did independent lessons. But if we finished early, “I don’t want you reading ahead in your readers. Choose a book from the reading shelf.” That was the first year I didn’t finish the whole reading text by December. She knew me too well.
The reading shelf consisted of Miss King’s own books, some of which she may have read when she was a child. I mean, they were old. She had the rest of the Alcott books (I had read only Little Women and Little Men.) There were books about the Rover Boys and Horatio Alger stories. And there were boarding school books.
Boarding school stories (I don’t know of a better name for them) were obviously written to be instructive and morally uplifting for young people. Fortunately, they were also good stories. They were written to a formula, as so many stories are. There was always a main character, a pleasant person – usually a boy, although there were some girls’ boarding school books too. He had his group of friends, who usually included one very studious kid and one not too clever, but usually the fun person of the group. The main character usually had some special talent, might have been attending on scholarship or at the generosity of some distant relative or even an anonymous benefactor. Often he was an orphan, which relieved the author from having to describe his family.
In every one of these books, the main character had an enemy, another student (and his friends) who personified all the bad traits one shouldn’t have. The boy would be well liked by most of his teachers, but there was always one teacher who had it in for him. The students usually played some sport that was very important to them – football, basketball, cricket. (Not too much cricket, because most of these stories were American.) In whatever difficulties or competitions that was the center of the story, of course Our Hero always won in the end.
What made me remember all this? I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter books and enjoying them all over again. It’s an old-fashioned boarding school book, with the addition of a little fantasy.
And then, last night on “Jeopardy!” a question came up about Arthur C. Clarke, quoted as saying:
Isn’t that what I said? I’m feeling wise again – ha-ha-ha.
