With school starting this week in Simpson County, I’ve been reliving some of my own early experiences with education.
After just a few weeks in the first grade, I began to sense that the school’s goal was to make me like everyone else, a goal to which I had never personally aspired.
It isn’t that I didn’t like school. I loved it from the very beginning. I loved the bus ride to school every day, I loved my school supplies, I loved being with the other kids. I loved reading time, and I don’t even remember learning to read—I could just suddenly do it.
Other things weren’t as fun and seemed to require a lot of conformity.
We did a lot of coloring that year. Our teacher, Mrs. Washington, would hand out coloring sheets and tell us to color the picture. I think she just wanted a few minutes to herself, but that was fine with me. Coloring was one of my favorite activities at home, and I would begin eagerly, filling in the shapes of flowers, people and animals with my favorite colors from the Crayola box.
But I soon learned that the purpose of this activity was not to nurture creativity but to teach us that there were right and wrong ways to color, a concept I had never heard of.
Mrs. Washington didn’t like creativity. She had a list of sins and faux pas that could be committed in coloring, the worst of which were coloring outside the lines and using “wrong colors.” She took issue with the little girl I colored in a red skirt and a pink blouse, a combination I had thought glorious. Nor did she appreciate my choice of green shutters on a blue house. The woman had obviously never seen houses in Bermuda.
She would sneak up behind me, narrow her eyes, screw up her mouth and hiss, “We don’t wear pink and red together, and we don’t color outside the lines!” I sat there wondering who “we” were and why “we” didn’t have any fashion sense. That girl’s skirt had seemed to need a little more fullness, so I went outside the lines to create it. But to smooth the teacher’s feathers, I dressed my next little girl in my picture in a boring navy skirt with a white blouse. And I stayed in the lines.
Arithmetic was another subject in which a strict adherence to rules seemed to be necessary. Every day we were to write all the numbers from 1 to 100 in columns of 10. If you did it without a mistake, you got to go out to recess. If you didn’t you stayed in to finish or make corrections.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I was too creative to be good at arithmetic, which seemed to require getting it “right.” One of my columns of numbers might look like this: 11-12-13-14-16-19-20. In my defense, when I should have been writing 15, 17 and 18, I was thinking about the pretzels I would eat at recess. But as I was unbending out of my desk to dash outside, Mrs. Washington would swoop in low, squinch up her eyes, purse her lips and crow, “WHERE is 15? 17? 18? Erase the whole thing, please, and start again.”
I missed almost every recess that year. I ate my pretzels on the bus going home in the afternoons.
Even my beloved reading textbook, Dick and Jane, implied that I was different, and my family was not like it was supposed to be.
In Dick and Jane’s world, families were supposed to have a mother (called Mother), a father (called very formally
Father), a son (Dick), a daughter (Jane), and a baby sibling (unimaginatively called Baby), a dog (Spot) and a cat (Puff).
The pictures in the textbook implied that all mothers were housewives who cooked and cleaned in church dresses, pearls and high heels. Fathers wore suits and hats and carried brief cases to work every day. Daughters had curly blond hair and wore frilly pink dresses (with no red on them) and black Mary Janes. Dogs were all fat, friendly cocker spaniels, and cats were amusing little balls of fur.
My family, on the other hand consisted of only a mother (Mama), who worked outside the home and was too smart to do housework in high heels; a father (Daddy), who didn’t own a briefcase and wore a suit only on Sundays; me—who didn’t have a single blond hair or frilly pink dress and who wore scuffed loafers to school; and my beloved dog, Skipper, a big, fierce German shepherd who growled at anyone who approached me. Obviously, we had no cat—read the last clause above.
So, as I wasn’t Mrs.Washington’s ideal student, neither did my family fit the Perfect Family Model I saw in Dick and Jane. I wondered for years if I was adopted or if my parents could be persuaded to shape up a bit.
But school didn’t break me. I took my lumps, colored red and pink outfits at home, and carefully chose a career that didn’t require math skills. I conformed when necessary. And through it all, I grew up to be myself.
And that’s what I wish for every kid out there this year. I hope it’s a happy and productive one.
