A Dozen School Memories

First grade at Preston's Gap (one-room) School.  Playing 'kick the can' at recess and being so frustrated I could not "catch" anyone because they were so much older (and faster) than me.  Bragging I was going to make straight A's but Mrs Cooper giving me a B in 'effort'.  LOL...  Is that a compliment?

Second grade at West Van Lear.  My first year there.  Mrs. Green grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking the crap out of me for something.  Back then teachers were pretty physical.

Third grade with my teacher, Gay Bailey.  Getting my first 'paddling' in school for running in class.  Hey, there were people running but I just jumped over my desk and did not even take a running start.  I felt a little picked on but the whipping did not hut.  The one from both my mother and father once I got home and they found out was much more worrying.  Luckily I did not get one or both. 

Fourth grade with Mrs. Hazlette.  This was where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.  The fourth grade class room had the "front porch" of the school as a main entrance.  I remember sitting out on the porch (right side coming out of the building) in the November sunshine thinking about the assassination.

Fifth grade with Mrs. Mollette.  That is the class where I asked everyone what animal gave milk but a cow and then told them it was a woman.  Mrs. Mollette was NOT impressed.  It was also the grade I made a notebook saying exactly what I thought of each of my classmates.  That did not go over very well either when the one person I trusted to show it to passed it around to everyone including the teacher. 

Sixth grade with Tom Hummer as teacher.  Sixth grade was complicated.  I got my first filling in a 'permanent' tooth.  I got my second paddling for not filling out my "Weekly Reader" questions because the teacher told us not to to them before they were assigned but I was working in the kitchen when he assigned them... so I did not do them.  oops.   He was also the teacher who told me I enunciated my words very clearly.  Oh wow!  Praise for something!  Since then I've been somewhat of a grammar/pronunciation Nazi.  Not ashamed of it either.  It is either right or wrong and I always preferred to be right.

Seventh grade... Mr. DeLong.  He was the nephew of my soon-to-be brother-in-law and our principal.  I was terrified of him.  But he really introduced me to sarcasm as an effective tool for communication.  By this time I was reading Asimov, Heinlien, Clarke, Anderson, Norton and many other "adult" authors but when the time came for book reports I would grab one of those little, blue covered, biographies to do it on.  I always hated any kind of public speaking and always took the easy way out.   He commented on how "some people" would read books at one level then make their book reports on a book at a much lower level.  So? Sue me.

We moved from West Van Lear back to Nat's Creek at the end of my seventh grade year.  I got my report card about two weeks early as we were moving and I would not be able to go to any school at all for those two weeks.  We were having a contest on who would read the most books that year.  I had something like a twenty seven book lead when we moved.  I hope the kid who got the award appreciates it a great deal because it was (and IS) rightfully mine!!!

When school started again my cousins were all going to Cherryville school.  It was another one room school and I fully intended to go there myself.  But I did not get off the bus.  On down the road was the Chapman school.  A two-room school house.  I did not get off there either.  I stayed on the bus until the end of the line at Louisa High School.  At that time it was in town and was grades eight through twelve.  That is how I got to Louisa in the eighth grade.

There is a lot I can say about that year and will in time but  That was my introduction to being one of the "mean" kids.  As well as one of he most "picked on" kids at the same time.  That was the first school where we changed classes.  When the bell would ring we would all leave and as we would go out the door we (boys) would all run our hands up under the girl's dresses.   I suppose that might appear crude but they  never made any effort to leave the class room in any hurry so I think they probably enjoyed it as well.

I had a varied and interesting group of teachers in the eighth grade and I'll talk more in detail about that  at some future time.  That was a very good and a very bad year.



Sophomore year was the year I got to read novels in class without teachers bugging me.  Mr. (Greenville) Cordell was my social studies teacher for several years.  This year it was Economics and Sociology.  On test days we would have the first thirty minutes of class to study then the second thirty to take the test.  When he told us to study I pulled out my western novel and started reading.  Mr. Cordell saw that and asked me, "Frank, are you going to make a 100 on this test".  I told him, quite honestly, "of course".  He said no more.  I made a 100 on the test and he never questioned my reading habits again.  But it was such an absurdly simple course.   NOT making a 100 would have been the hard part.  But it did give me some extra reading time.

My junior year had a great English teacher.  Funny I can't remember her name at all.  But she said she always knew she had to give her tests twice.  Once to the rest of the class and once to me when I bothered to come to class.  I think her name was Johnson.  And,  I would not have made it these days.  I missed over forty days of school my sophomore, junior and senior years.  Back then it was all about grades and I made the grades.  Pissed my future wife off no end.  She worked her butt off in class and I played when I bothered to show up and still made better grades.  :-)  A mind may be a terrible thing to waste but it is also a terrible burden when you spend your entire life bored to distraction.

I forget if it was my freshman or sophomore year when I first took my stack of books from the library (boy, a school library!  What a wonderful thing) to the desk and the librarian would not let me check them out because they were all on the senior reading list... I had to go to my English teacher and get a note stating I had a brain and could safely be allowed to read a book with more content than "See Dick.  See Jane.  See Spot."  Even with that it did not take too long for there to be darned little left in the library to read I had not read.

Senior year was interesting.  At that time we needed eighteen credits to graduate.  I took five each of my first three years so I could only have to take three my senior year.  I has three classes and three study halls.  I had one to do all my homework, one to read my novels and one to play "flip football" and other games with my friends and just generally goof off. 

That year my English teacher was Imogene Butler.  She only had one lung and in the winter missed even more days than I did.  But she had a little red head substitute I loved to sit in the back and flirt with.  She was ugly as a mud fence but she was a very nice young woman and not really all that much older than me. 

That year I had two required classes (English IV and American Government) and had to pick up one elective.  I took Art the first semester with Mr Cheek (the Principal) as the teacher.  Our "student motto" was "Our school is like an ass; it takes two cheeks to run it".  Jim Cheek was the principal and his brother Bill Cheek was the superintendent.

Anyway, the second semester they decided to offer a French class and I signed up for it and dropped art.  I had zero artistic talent anyhow.  Our French teacher was Mz Bunch and I imagine she wished she had never seen me.  LOL.

At that time I was reading a lot of porn novels.  One of which was called the Coxman.  It had a lot of sexual terms in French so I was continuously asking Mz Bunch to translate them for me in front of the class.... "Miss Bunch, what is a 'manage a troi'"? 

All in all, school had a lot of fun things involved with it and not just the painful things I've talked about before.  Sure wish I could have spent some time with that redheaded substitute out of class...