By the time I was old enough for kindergarten, my goal in life was to go to school. When I was five, I’d been told, I’d be old enough to start kindergarten. My birthday was in April, long past the November deadline, so I had to wait until the next September. It was a bitter pill to swallow since I’d been primed to start school the minute I turned five.
My older sister Dorothy had taken me to school with her near the end of the previous school year (a common practice at the time, intended to familiarize youngsters with the schoolroom and its accompanying rules.) I loved the friendly teacher, the tall windows, all the bright posters and charts on the bulletin board, the old swings and teeter-totters on the playground as well as the shiny new jungle-gym. The gigantic slate blackboards were gray with chalk dust from being repeatedly written on and rubbed clean with the dark felt erasers. Because Dorothy had taught me to read by then, I felt as if I’d been given a peek into my future when I discovered I could decipher most of the messages on the blackboards and posters. Three or four other prospective kindergarteners shared desks with their older siblings as I did. I superstitiously explored the contents of Dorothy’s desk and was delighted to think that I might soon possess some of the exciting tools that went with being “in school.”
Kindergarten was vastly different from my experience in Dorothy’s fourth grade classroom, but the year flew by, filled with new songs and stories, new friends from outside my immediate neighborhood, and rules to be obeyed. We were introduced to Show and Tell, and when it was my turn, I proudly wrote my name on the blackboard, in cursive as Dorothy had taught me. Miss Simon, my first teacher, coldly informed me that it had been a mistake to learn such things before they were offered “properly” in school. My reading skills were equally criticized as being something that would have to be “unlearned” so that I could learn to read along with the rest of my classmate, in the “right” way. Fortunately, it turned out that Dorothy had been a “proper” teacher and drilled me in phonics as well as arithmetic and spelling, closely imitating the methods that had been used to teach herself.
I’ve always supposed it was because of Dorothy, and the running start she gave me, that school was always easy for me, I earned good grades and seldom came across discouraging challenges. Granted, there were subjects that held less interest for me, but my report cards sported mostly A’s and B’s and by the time I entered junior high, I had decided I wanted to be a teacher someday. My favorite subject at that time was English – probably due to two outstanding teachers – one who stressed grammar and punctuation, the other who proved to me that even twelve-year-olds could understand and appreciate Shakespeare.
There was also, in junior high, a math teacher who hinted at exciting things to come after we’d mastered fractions, compound interest, negative numbers and long division and were ready to enter the fascinating worlds of algebra and geometry. In high school Miss Hunnicutt got me hooked on equations and the challenge of tracking down unknown numbers represented by x’s and y’s. Mr. Ryan took solid geometry off the paper and made those three-dimensional forms so real we could almost handle and examine them. My best grades were in math and English and I knew I wanted to be a teacher and bring those subjects to life for my students as those good teachers had done for me.
It would be my math and English skills that earned me a Merit Scholarship to the University of Iowa where I majored, of all unlikely things, in art. Because I had tested out of basic math classes, I had the option of taking an introductory class in another subject not necessarily required. Because I’d always enjoyed drawing and creating things, and because there had been no art classes offered in the Knoxville schools at the time, I signed up for a basic art appreciation class which included lectures on art history and a studio class in drawing and painting. It fascinated me and changed my life.