School Daze

by guest blogger Bill Crider

I was thinking about my education the other day.  I didn’t get off to a good start.

The problem was that I didn’t want to get educated.  My mother had to drag me all the way to school the first day, and I remember sitting in the basement cafeteria of the W. M. White building, looking sullen and vowing that I’d never return.  I did, however.

Kicking, screaming, crying?  I tried them all, but my mother didn’t discourage easily.  She arranged for a couple of my cousins, Ray and Faye Lynn Eubanks, to stop by the house on their way to school because she knew I’d walk along with them rather than cause a scene. (In those long-ago days in small-town East Texas, no one was driven to school.  Everybody walked or rode a bike.)  Her ploy worked, and I got through the first grade.  But I didn’t like it.

It wasn’t until fifth grade that I started to think there might be something to the education thing.  That was because Miss Ellie Hughes sometimes read to the class every day after lunch: Tom Sawyer.  Heidi.  Great stuff.  I loved hearing it, and on the days when she didn’t read, we were allowed to read whatever we wanted to.  Somehow John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River got into my hands, and a door opened in my head.  I’d never read anything quite like it.

The next year, in the sixth grade, things got even better because of one teacher, Mrs. Reid Partlow, who for some reason took a liking to me.  Maybe it was because I was the only kid in the class who actually liked to diagram sentences.  Maybe it was because I liked to memorize poetry.  But for whatever reason, she saw something in me that no other teacher ever had, and she made me feel as if going to school might be worth my while.  After all, if a guy could diagram a sentence, the world was bound to be his oyster.

Or maybe not.  At any rate, you may already have noticed something about this little account, and it would become even more obvious if I went on.  What came first with me wasn’t really the curriculum.  It was the teachers.  I don’t remember much about geometry and algebra, but I do remember Mrs. Sue Bates telling the class that we’d all be speaking Russian if little Billy Crider didn’t learn the binomial theorem.  (Don’t thank me.  I never learned it.  She was just mistaken.)  I remember Mrs. H. A. Burleson, Miss Minnie Ruth Smith, Mrs. Lucy Byers, and so many others, even though I don’t remember much I was supposed to be learning in their classes.  (Except for Miss Minnie’s class.  Typing I, the most useful class I ever took.)
 
Many years after my public schooling, when I was working on my doctorate, a friend named John Irsfeld said, “I’m not teaching English.  I’m teaching Irsfeld.”  He had a point.  I suspect that if any of the many students I had in my classes over the years remember anything at all, they remember me, the person, not what I might have said about Henry David Thoreau.  That’s a scary thought.

Did you notice how I sneaked in that bit about the doctorate?  Yes, I went to school for a long time.  You’d never have guessed it, not considering the way I started out, but after a while, I didn’t want to stop going to school.  My lovely wife, Judy, claims that if I could have figured out a way, I’d still be taking classes.  Maybe I was learning something, after all.
I also sneaked in a mention of my own students.  Yes, I became a teacher.  It was the only way I knew that I could stay in school for the rest of my life.  I began by hating to go, but by the time I graduated for the first time, I didn’t want to leave.  So I didn’t.

Last fall, I saw Faye Lynn Eubanks at a high school reunion.  You can probably guess what she said to me: “Bill Crider.  If it hadn’t been for me and Ray, you’d have been a first-grade drop-out.”  What could I say?  She was right.  I thanked her for saving me.

I retired from my teaching job a few years ago.  I don’t regret that move, but every fall when the first day of the semester rolls around, I get the feeling that I should be at the school, waiting for classes to begin.  Then I remember that kid, sitting in that basement cafeteria all those years ago, and I think of how little he knew then of the way his life would go.

So what about your own education?  Did you learn anything?  Meet anybody worth knowing?  Hate every minute of it?  And what does all this have to do with writing, anyway?  I have an answer that last one, but that’s another story, for another day.

Comments

[Leann]

School and the teachers meant so much to me. It was my refuge, my salvation, the most fun I ever had. Until I ended up in nursing school. Now that was pure hell. Bill, you wouldn't have gone on for that doctorate if you'd ever gone to Catholic nursing school. But just as with being a teacher, I did learn the joy of giving. (And I did go back later and get another degree, so the pain the nuns inflicted did fade. Sorta.)

[moni]

Ah yes, my first day at school I hid in the coat room the entire day and was only found when the other kids came to get their coats to go home. I taught school for many years and still miss getting my classroom ready in late August for the Sept. rush.

[paul lamb]

Mixed feelings. I don't remember anything but delight about school until the 3rd grade when my family moved to a more affluent neighborhood. Torment began then. As for learning, I suppose something stuck. In high school I had two teachers who interested me in writing, but I had already begun a lifetime of reading by then. It wasn't until graduate school that I really got serious about writing as an ambition rather than just a hobby.

[Cap'n Bob]

I was the only kid in first-grade class who hadn't attended kindergarten, thus the only one who didn't know the Pledge of Allegiance and whatever other rituals with which we started the day. The teacher thought I was a wiseass and rebuked me. I went home and told my mother I wasn't going back. The next day she took me to school, explained my situation to the teacher, and everything was supposedly okay. But it was too late. I never warmed up to that old lady. Over the years I had some good teachers and some monsters who should have been killed with a stick. I can't say any of them influenced my life, though. Maybe because I moved so often I never felt a part of any school or community.

[Gerard]

"Maybe it was because I was the only kid in the class who actually liked to diagram sentences. Maybe it was because I liked to memorize poetry."

Jeeze, Crider. You are a nerd.

[Bill Crider]

Sad, but true.