My Great Grandmother Maggie was a teacher in a one room schoolhouse. But she was also a teacher in her own house. And that is how it came to be that my mother learned to read when she was four years old.
My Great Grandmother Maggie Elizabeth Wallace Kennedy
My mother had what we in education call a “late birthday” (at the end of October) so she started school at five years old. She had been there for three days when her teacher brought in a pile of books and had her read for an audience of adults as well as for her impressed classmates. Immediately she was pulled from that classroom and placed in second grade.
First School Picture
Five years old. Second grade. It was a decision that would impact my mother for many years.
Socially, and physically, she just wasn’t able to keep up with her peers. She felt uncomfortable…out of place…so a few weeks after skipping first grade, little five year old Aggie skipped school for the first time. As the story goes, she told the teacher she had a headache and wanted to walk to her grandmother’s house to rest. Of course, in 1932, there would be no phone call home for permission, so my mother set out walking down the railroad tracks. She did actually end up near her grandmother’s house but never made it all the way there. Instead she played in a nearby yard with a younger cousin. Again and again, she saw her uncle pass by, looking for her, but she hid behind a tree and continued to play.
She says the “reprimand” she received after that stunt would be considered child abuse today, and she wore overalls to school for a month after. She didn’t skip school “many” times after that, she says, although she did slip away on a few occasions. Her complaint stayed the same: she was a baby in a classroom of older kids. At 85 years old she still has a sadness in her voice when she says, “I didn’t get to do the things the other kids could do.”
There she is, studying with a book in front of her.
She explained that she was too young to date when her classmates did, and then she shared a long, involved story about brassiere-wearing that I won’t repeat here. But she still excelled academically and graduated at age fifteen and was named salutatorian of her class. As such, she was offered a full scholarship to a college two hours away…but her parents wouldn’t let her attend.
“Who would send a fifteen-year-old away to live in a dorm?” she asked. She didn’t blame her parents for the missed opportunity. Instead, she attended a nearby business college where the style of shorthand they taught was different, and not as practical, as the style she had learned in high school. And although she could already type sixty words per minute, the teachers at that business college made her start from the beginning, learning each key as if she were a novice at typing.
My beautiful mother, around the time she was in business school
All of it was very frustrating for my mother, but she continued on, actually working until the age of eighty as a bookkeeper in a real estate office. She’d be there now if it weren’t for the fall she took on her lunch hour outside the mall one day. She suffered a broken hip and broken elbow on the day that she, as we say, “dropped before she shopped.”
But my mother’s story isn’t altogether different from situations we see in schools today. Do we have students who, for whatever reason, don’t fit in, don’t feel comfortable? Do we have students who need more enriching assignments because they have already mastered the basics? Do we need to provide individualized instruction for each and every one of our students so that they don’t become frustrated and become creative at methods of escape?
In many ways, not so much has changed since 1932. Well, except if a student is sick, we do pick up the phone and call the parents…which is probably why I never skipped school myself. I don’t look so great in overalls.