My Chosen Field

Not a surprise, my chosen field is history.  I’ve enjoyed history almost as long as I can remember, certainly before I even knew it was called history.  Back in the day we called it “social studies”.  I remember learning about caveman back in third grade and I was fascinated by the cave paintings and the way the caveman lived.  Up until then I had not realized that cavemen were real.

       What do you remember about Grade 3?  I remember learning script (i.e. moving from printing to writing).  I remember David Ament getting his haired pulled by Mrs. Miller because he kept turning around in his desk to talk to me.  I remember Mrs. Miller asking Kurt Noble what made bread rise and his answer “a toaster” got him put in the corner.  I remember we learned about different types of shelter, or homes, from tree houses to caves.  We did a lot of reading out loud and we did a lot of arithmetic.  We still called it arithmetic, not math which didn’t come until we were in junior high school.  We had reading and composition (not literature or English).  We had P.T. not gymn, phys ed, or P.E.  (P.T. stood for physical training I suppose but we didn’t know that, we just knew we had to run around the “auditorium” a lot, because it was an auditorium, not a gymn). 

       At recess we played at skipping, hop scotch, yogi (jumping with elastics), bounced balls against the school wall, and raced around the school yard playing tag.  We didn’t have swing sets or slides, we basically had tar pavement around the school and then lots of grass which as often muddy because of snow or rain.  We went out for recess twice a day, every day, rain, shine or snow.  In a school year it was rare if we were made to stay in, perhaps once in the whole school year.  It was never too cold or too wet to be sent out for 15 minutes.  If the teacher caught us doing something bad we got smacked, sometimes on the head, sometimes on the hands with a ruler and occasionally on the butt.  No permission necessary from the parents.  If you got sent to the principal’s office you better look out because you would get the strap because your mother would tell the principal to give the culprit an extra one from her (that never happened to me but I heard about it, as did all the other kids when one of the boys “got it”).  In those days the mothers believed that her little Johnny was capable of any amount of wrong doing and deserved to be punished if he got caught.  There were a few “bad Johnnies” in my grade 3 class, notably Kurt. But also boisterous boys who did get in trouble by accident (like throwing snowballs), Gerald and David, Ricky and Dennis.  It was very rare for girls to get into trouble, in fact I don’t remember any girls getting into trouble until we were in grade 6 and mostly that was Ruth talking back to the teacher.

       Yep, those were the good old days.  Today the kids call them the Olden Days.  Gosh, really?