Archive for the ‘My primary school years’ Category:
I attended Marion Hill School for grades 4, 5, and 6. My fourth grade teacher was Mrs. Shuller. My fifth grade teacher was Mrs. Blinn. My sixth grade teacher was a teacher right out of college, Miss Milner.
Fourth grade was a turning point in my early education. Up to then I had been a very good student. I always had some of the highest grades in my class. I loved learning. After fourth grade and through high school graduation I lost the love of learning. Mrs. Shuller was an older teacher. We were her last group before she retired. Also, the year she was our teacher, her husband was dying of some disease. She was a nervous wreck. Once or twice every day she’d have us put our heads down on the desk and close our eyes so she could take some pills. I guess the pills were for her nerves. She was very irritable most of the time and she yelled a lot. Learning certainly wasn’t fun with her. We never knew when she would suddenly get angry and start yelling.
One day she gave us a homework assignment. The next day she called some students to the board to write things from their homework. All of the students in the first group “did it wrong.” She started yelling that they hadn’t listened when she gave the homework assignment and that’s why they did it wrong. The truth was that we had done it the way she told us but she forgot what she told us. She called some other students to the board and they also had it wrong. She was very angry at this point. She then asked how many students had done the homework the wrong way and most of the students raised their hands. I had done it “wrong” but I didn’t raise my hand because I knew what she would do. She told everyone who had done it “wrong” to come to the front of the room for one swat with the paddle (yes, corporal punishment was allowed back then). I was trembling but I avoided the spanking. Then she explained how to do the homework again (of course this was different from how she’d explained it the day before). Then she told everyone to hand in the homework papers. OH NO! I knew I was in big trouble then. That night I wrote a little letter telling her that I and most of the students had done the homework the way she explained and that was why most of us had done it “wrong.” I then did the homework the new way, but not just once…I did the same assignment three times to show her I was serious about doing my homework and doing it correctly.
The next morning I went into the classroom and went straight to her desk to put my “special homework” there before class started. She was out in the hallway at the time. As I laid the papers on her desk I saw a note she had written that said, “Spank David for lying about his homework.” Now I was really terrified. She came into the room and sat at her desk. She picked up the homework I had put there and read my letter. She looked like she was going to cry. She didn’t spank me. Later in the day she apologized to the whole class for spanking so many students the day before. She said that when she read my letter and had looked back over the events of the day before she realized so many students wouldn’t have done the homework wrong the same way.
Still, I lived in fear of going to her class every day. I developed stomach problems that year. My parents took me to the doctor because I continued to complain about my stomach hurting almost every morning before school. The doctor determined it was just nerves. It wasn’t until I had been in the military for about six years and started taking college classes at night that I discovered my love of learning again. But, that’s a story for another post.
Restored one-room schoolhouse
I attended Brewer School on Sunflower Road for my third grade year. Brewer School was an old brick four-room schoolhouse when I was a student. My father and his siblings also attended there. The building is no longer a school. It was sold to a private investor some years ago. He made it into a house. I stopped by to see it in May 2008, and it looked unoccupied. They have replaced the old wooden windows with PVC windows and have made some other modern upgrades.
When I attended we had two places to play at recess and during the lunch hour. We could play in the gravel parking lot in front of the school or we could play on the grassy slope behind the school (between the back side of the school building and Sunflower Road). The slope was covered in trees and there was a stream at the bottom, near the road. We were forbidden from playing in the stream during school hours. There was a granite war memorial halfway down the slope. It had the names of men from the Sunflower Road and Allendale Road areas who had served in World War II. My father as well as his brothers, Allen and Gerald (Bill), are listed on the memorial. When Brewer School was sold, the community moved the memorial to a prominent position in front of the New Brighton Volunteer Fire Department which is near the entrance to the Gulbransen Heights subdivision, between Marion Hill and Brewer School on Sunflower Road.
Miss Gipson was my third grade teacher. She was a middle-aged, unmarried woman. The boys at the school like to play football during recess and lunch hour. After several of us tore our pants or got hurt the teachers said we couldn’t play football games any longer. They said we could only throw the football to each other. When I was young I could kick a football pretty well. One day at lunch I kicked the ball really high just as Miss Gipson walked out of the building. She called me over and told me we weren’t allowed to play football. I told her I wasn’t playing a game of football, I was only kicking. She said we were only allowed to throw the ball not kick it (I don’t remember anyone telling us we couldn’t kick it). I wasn’t allowed to go outside to play at lunch hour for a week for kicking the ball.
There is a small, one-room wooden schoolhouse on Sunflower Road, just before you turn in to Brewer School. I have no idea how old this school building is. It was old and falling into disrepair when I was a young boy. The owners of the building let my Boy Scout troop hold meetings there for a couple of years when I was in my early teens. We had a big used newspaper recycling drive one year and filled the basement of the old school with used newspapers. We sold them to earn money for our troop. I assumed the old building had either fallen down or had been torn down in the years since I lived there. I was very surprised in 2008 to see that someone had restored it.
I would love to have more information about Brewer School and the little one-room schoolhouse near it. I’d like to know the history of these buildings and I’d love to have copies of old photos of them. If you have anything to share, please let me know.
The house where I grew up on Harold Street in Allendale, PA, about three miles from New Brighton. My father, Howard, his father, Allen, and my uncles helped build this house.
I didn’t go to kindergarten. I attended Kenwood Elementary School, on Oak Hill in New Brighton, PA., for first and second grades. My first grade teacher was Mrs. Young, in 1957. She had her first baby during the year she was my teacher. I was kinda the teacher’s pet. She selected me to be the one to run to the office for help if she should get sick in class (during the time she was pregnant)–a job I never needed to do. I remember that she brought the baby to class after it was several weeks old for us to look at and touch, if we wanted.
My second grade teacher was Ms. Johnson. I don’t remember if she was a Miss or a Mrs.
One distinct thing I remember from either my first or second grade years was that when we got to the building one morning there was a lot of activity. The teachers hustled us off to our classrooms but we could tell something was wrong. Later in the morning the teacher told us the the school janitor had died just after he came to the building in the morning. He was an older man and had apparently had a heart attack or something. He was the grandfather of one of the students in the school. They had to take that student out to be with his parents before they announced the death to the rest of us. This is my first clear memory of someone I had known dying.
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