I resist the temptation to over-glorify people and institutions of
childhood memory. My experience at Dan
D. Rogers was not without fault. But I
do reflect upon my five years of attendance favorably; given what I now know, I conclude that this
was one of those schools that
1) was not as yet ruined by
the intellectual corruption that had been emanating from Teacher’s College of Columbia
University since the 1920s; and
2) was a very good to
excellent school of the curricular and pedagogical type that prevailed until such
ruination set in.
I had excellent phonics instruction. I knew that parts of speech and fundamental
rules of punctuation and grammar. I
could carry and borrow (regroup) respectively in addition and subtraction. I knew my multiplication tables by the end of
third grade and in the course of that academic year fully mastered the now
long-lost art of multi-digit division.
Via specialized mathematics courses at grade 4 and 5, I gained a very
strong grip on fundamentals of fractions, decimals, and percentages; and interpretation of charts, tables, and
graphs. I could write a well-structured
essay and give a speech. As early as
grade 2, I was required to report on a news article each week. We studied the major Native American groups, European
explorers, the founders. We had regular
book fairs and made frequent trips to the school library: A biography that I read of Apache warrior Geronimo
is especially memorable. I remember that
a very demanding English teacher in grade 4 introduced us to Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, and Emily Dickenson;
there was no Langston Hughes or Countee Cullen in the curriculum, poetic
quality abided.
For my grades 6-7 years and half of my grade 8 year, my family
lived away from Texas, first to suburban St. Louis, for just half an academic
year, then for 24 months in Little Rock, Arkansas. I remember the beginning of grade 6 in
Missouri as being good enough; but a choir
performance at Christmas and a week-long school trip to a campsite replete with
opportunities for learning archery and the art of fire-building made more of an
impression on me than did any classroom-based academic quality that might have
rivaled Dan D.
For the last half of my grade 6 year, I attended Williams Elementary
in Little Rock, Arkansas; moving then
for one and one-half academic year to Forest Heights Junior High School. I enjoyed my experience at Williams but
noticed that students were well behind my own academic level. Remarkably, on a given day in spring 1963 I
was the only student in the class who knew that the contraction, “let’s,” was a
short form of “let us.”
Instruction at Forest Heights was erratic. The one truly stellar class that I had was honors
grade 8 math; even though “new math” was
beginning to creep in, and my teacher was up to speed, she was also
magnificently old-school, so that my skill with fractions, decimals, and
percentages developed apace; and I got a
first-rate introduction to order of operations, algebraic equations, and
various applications of geometry. We
also had a super choir instructor, upon reflection almost certainly gay and
discontented with his paycheck--- but despite
the latter, our cheerful conveyor of a love for the Great American Songbook and
Broadway hit tunes, from which many such as the following have forever lodged
in my memory and now rolling down I-35 in Minnesota come tumbling out of my
mouth:
Let there be peace on
earth
and let it begin with me;
and
When you walk through a storm,
keep your head up high,
and don’t be a afraid of
the dark,
for at the end of the
storm,
there’s a golden light,
and the sweet, gentle song
of the lark.
My grade seven English teacher was solid, so that the skills that
I had been accumulating and the literature to which I was privy kept me on a
promising track of development in English usage and literature. Science instruction was lousy. Industrial arts was good. Geography was fine. On balance, teacher quality was mediocre but
the curriculum was still ambitious, and my vision of what constitutes an
excellent education continued to be fortified with strong knowledge and skills
sets.
At mid-grade 8 the family moved back to Texas, not to Dallas but
rather to the Memorial area of suburban Houston. In grade 8, I had excellent opportunities in
a speech class and tournament, for the latter of which I performed Patrick Henry’s
“Give Me Liberty” speech. I had mediocre
general science and United States history classes; but the curriculum was strong and the
textbooks informative, so again the vision of knowledge as the core of
education remained firm. My English teacher
at Memorial Junior High (thus bearing the older middle-grades classification connoting
anticipation of high school, but in fact having adopted the grade 6-8 scheme) struck
me as a brilliant guy who considered his post as a waystation for his own
authorial ambitions and considered most students in the class dullards; however, he took a liking to me and a friend
of mine and pointed us in the direction of Dickens and Poe.
At grade 9, I was on to Memorial High School, where a few teachers
were truly excellent and even the many mediocre instructors followed a curriculum
that implied the paramount importance of knowledge in the liberal and
vocational arts for defining excellence in education.
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