Do You Remember First Grade?

When I was six years old a whole new phase of life began for little Sammy.  Although the purpose was to gain an education and I’m sure that was a worthy endeavor in and of itself, I’m just not sure I initially placed this ultimate goal in life as utmost in my thinking at such a tender age.  Oh, I had been taught to share and to try and get along with others before entering school, but now, all of a sudden I found myself alone, with no parental supervision.  It was a whole new ballgame for a growing youngster in which I was about to learn that it would be to my best advantage and interest if I learned to listen and obey other adults in addition to my own parents.

Do you remember what you were taught in the first grade? We learned our abc’s and that 1 + 1 = 2. Heck, my brothers and sister taught me how to add and subtract up to 10, as well as my abc’s at home. I do remember taking a large towel to take a nap on each day and we played with wooden blocks with numbers and letters on them I recall. I also carried my lunch in a brown paper bag and purchased a small bottle of milk for recess and one for lunch for 8¢. If I took a dime to school, I was to bring two cents back home. That’s how I learned to add and subtract. If I didn’t have my two pennies when I got home from school, I went back along the same path looking for them or I’d better have a good story as to what happened. “Times were hard and money was tight,” my dad said during my first year of school in 1949-1950. I remember watching my parents count out change on the kitchen table each night making sure all four of us kids had lunch money or in my case, money for milk each day.

Well, we didn’t start writing the very first day in the first grade, maybe the second six weeks or even later as I remember and we use those big pencils. Do you remember the pencils in first grade? The red ones that was as big around as your finger and the pencil sharpener had a special hole in it just to accommodate that unique writing instrument. The writing pads of Blue Horse paper had three horizontal lines in each row and one vertical line that was called the margin on the left side. The lines must have been an inch apart and when we were ‘doing our numbers or letters’, you could just get two of three per line- no, just kidding, but we wrote so large in the first grade, I surely used a lot of paper . And we had the same teacher all day long. None of this changing class stuff until we got to junior high school, seventh grade, now that was something else.

Miss Necessary was my 1^st grade teacher and she walked me home the very first day as I remember. I was showing out in front of the guys and I pulled the pigtails of this little girl I thought was so cute. She turned around and slapped my face and that shocked me so much I guess, I just slapped her back. Now the teacher saw the whole thing and when questioned as to why I slapped a girl, I told her that my dad had told me that if anyone hit me I was to hit them back. Since he never distinguished between a boy or a girl, I figured I had a right. Miss Necessary felt differently and walked me right over the hill in the back of the school to my home pinching my ear all the way. I found out quickly that my folks agreed with Miss Necessary and after she left, mom gave me a thrashin’ and when dad got home, I got another one.

© 2010 SamSonS