Last week my heart melted when I received a photo on my iPhone of my five-year-old granddaughter standing outside of school. Her first day of kindergarten and she looked so grown up, not to mention tired after a night of sleepless excitement.
Then, a couple of days later, I stopped to chat with a group of picketing teachers, and the sadness set in. Not just for teachers, who want to be back at work, or kids, who want to be in school, or parents, many of whom are scrambling to find adequate care for their children, but for those first-day memories, which will eventually be made, but with a bittersweetness because they didn’t happen as anticipated.
When I was a kid in Calgary kindergartens weren’t part of the public school system. They were organized by communities and my clearest memory was of learning the German version of O Christmas Tree. How exciting and exotic to be singing in another language. Somehow, O Tannenbaum just sounds better.
The first day of school is the real deal, though. As I looked at that photo of Quinn I couldn’t help but think back to my first day at Terrace Road Elementary School. We lived less than two blocks away, so there were no buses involved. In fact, there were no kids who came to school by bus — that was pretty much a foreign concept. My first grade teacher lived only a few doors away from us and she was wonderful. But I remember clearly the sense of letdown I felt when we were put to work folding paper airplanes on that first day. Not that making airplanes wasn’t fun, but I was there to learn to read and write and I wanted to get on with it. My own mother had been a school teacher, and would soon after become the community’s kindergarten teacher, but she was not an advocate of teaching kids to read before they went to school, believing it would only lead to boredom for the child who was ahead of others. We had lots of books and were read to a lot, though, so reading and writing would come quickly and easily. I can still remember the frustrations brought on by the endless repetitiveness of our first grade primer. See Spot Run was entertaining for about 30 seconds, I think.
But starting into school was about much more than classroom learning (from our positions in 28 or so one-piece wood desks with inkwell holes and a big book drawer, all facing the teacher and never to be moved out of their rows). There was the thrill of meeting new kids who had either moved into the neighbourhood over the summer or who lived far enough away that we hadn’t run into them as we roamed a several-block radius around our homes.
Since those formative years I have always been fascinated with the way we were able to organize our activities. Before school, during lunch hour, after school and at recess, there were always games going on, few or none organized by teachers or other adults. The soccer ball was dropped or bats and balls were signed out or marbles pulled from our pockets and we just got to it. For our scrub softball games the first three kids to touch home base were batters, and the next three would pitch, catch and play first base. When you made an out, you went to the outfield, then gradually worked your way back as subsequent batters were put out.
Marbles were a near-miraculous experience. The first day of marble season (always in spring) just seemed to happen. One day no one was playing marbles and on the next the field was full of players. Marble-rich kids, who had boulders or steelies, dug little holes in the ground, set a treasure in front and started calling out, “Hit it in the pot, you get it!” Soon lineups would form of players who wanted their turn. Of course the kid with the treasure kept the marbles from unsuccessful shots.
It’s that schoolyard play that makes me wary of home schooling. We learned so many valuable skills when a couple hundred of us gathered on those fields and the tarmac in front of the doors. Girls brought their skipping ropes or chalk to draw games on the pavement, boys argued about who was on which team, small groups stood and repeated jokes from the previous night’s Red Skelton Show or relived the Maple Leafs win over the Canadiens. Adults, just like in the Charlie Brown comic strip, were rarely to be seen, and almost never to organize. I get the same thrill when I drive past Adam Robertson Elementary School when school is in. That hive of activity is a healthy thing. Let’s hope we see its return soon.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.