School Daze: Looking Back

By Dorothy Nixon

I grew up in a secular household, but there is one line from the Bible that I will never forget "They who go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters..."

It was my first day at school, grade one, and Mrs. D., my new teacher, matronly, tall and stern, had me come up to read in front of the class. It wasn't anyone else's first day, all the other children had commenced classes three months before in September. My family had just arrived in Montreal from the black-fly infested wilds of Wabush Lake, Labrador, so here I was, in December, my first day at R. V.Elementary School,(or any school, for that matter), a new kid not knowing anyone but still thrilled at the thought of going to school and learning new things. When I was asked to read from this unfamiliar book called the Bible, however, I couldn't read. Not a whit. I stood there, uneasy, perplexed, embarrassed, as "on the spot" as I have ever since been. Mrs. D. sensed a problem. She asked me if any particular words were giving me difficulty. "I don't know how to read ANY words," I told her, my heart pounding. So she stood behind me and whispered into my ear, "They who go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters.... "

I don't know if the special circumstances of my first day at school are the cause (after all, who doesn't carry baggage about school), but I have always harbored ambivalent feelings toward school. Every fall I would thrill to the thought of returning to school to learn new things, a thrill so electric, so physical, it exploded through me from top to bottom, and every fall, about ten days into class, I would feel depressed, heavily let down. School, an institution based on a military paradigm and designed for elite young men, killed off some magical parts of me, no doubt about it, even though I am somewhat suited to it, having an aptitude for math and language and a facility for abstract learning.

The rest of elementary school is but a great big blur to me, a blur that gets blurrier with each passing year. I recall only bits and pieces of it, in dreamscape fashion being scolded for doing a row of lazy g's in grade one, and justly so (the first and last time I was ever scolded at school, I made sure); the first and only time I ever got a sample of my handwriting up on the board, a carefully inked copy of Wordsworth's "Daffodils," a poem I still hold dear; painting tulips on the classroom windows while looking out over a "wealthy" part of the city and wondering why my family couldn't live there. I recall a day a certain S. brought a suitcaseful of puffy gray kittens in for Show and Tell and her pop-eyed expression as she desperately cupped her hands to catch the little brown clay-like turds they were dropping all over the teacher's desk. I also recall the time N. took off her tunic to prepare for gym only to discover that she hadn't put on her "bloomers." Imagine, everyone saw her underpants! The ultimate humiliation. I am willing to bet she stills recollects that occasion, too, even if she does sit on the Board of Directors of a big hospital.

I recall certain other children vividly, too, my heart naturally going out to the underdogs, the uncool, the awkward. There was poor J. who barfed his way to school every day, until he finally overcame his profound phobia to become the brightest boy in class, and P., who towered over his fiercely protective mother, even in grade one. He must have been 6'6" and 300 pounds! I retain an image in my mind of his tiny mom heroically reaching her mutilated umbrella up over her "little" darling's pumpkin-sized head to protect him from the lashes of a storm. "How pathetic," I recall thinking. I'd been walking to school alone since my second day! Years later, I bumped into said pathetic boy in the Humanities stacks at the McLennan Library at McGill. My soft heart was pleased to see he had shrunk over the years into a handsome, lithe, and rather independent six-footer.

And I also recall E. Sad, sad, E. Every mother's deepest fear upon sending her child to school is that she become the E. If it must be told, we kids played a game, like tag, except we called it "Who's got E?" and we ran around trying to rub E. off onto someone else, like a disease. I recall with shame playing along at this game. I happened onto E. some 15 years later. She was the receptionist at a doctor's office and appeared unscathed by the experience, but appearances can be deceiving. And I recall J., a new girl who seemed duller than dull. She performed terribly at school. She didn't try; she just dragged her pen over the page, distractedly, making herself an easy target for the teacher's reproofs. And then to make matters worse, one day this girl "washed her hair by mistake with Neet" and it all, slowly, fell out, so she was forced to wear this babushka-like kerchief, making her the recipient of further ridicule. I think back upon this little girl and her plight with real anger. Why didn't they just tell us that she had cancer and had come to Montreal for chemotherapy? Why the false propriety? What pain might have been saved had we only been told the truth?

Expo year, 1967, was the best year of my life. That's when my city hosted the International World's Fair. My grade six teacher, Mrs. C., a dowdy Britisher with revolutionary teaching principles, told us we would learn more at Expo than at school, so I took this to mean I could skip school any time. And I did...And I did... learning more at Expo that sweet spring visiting that glorious, fantastical, futuristic kingdom set up on two man-made islands in the Saint Lawrence River than I ever would have learned in the classroom. I often visited Expo alone, riding the Metro "underwater" to get there, although I am uncertain whether my parents knew about this. I loved lunching in the peaceful gardens behind the Canadian Pavilion, with it's "Katimavik," a giant inverted pyramid. I also made friends with two hostesses from the tiny tent- like Ethiopian pavilion, both Muslim girls from privileged families, one a serious young woman, one a "wild" Western-thinking teen. They wore veils. My other favorite haunts were the Western Provinces Pavilion, with the beautiful- smelling evergreen forest inside, and the Cominco Pavilion, which featured an award-winning film called "We are Young."

Expo was way before its time, a sensual once-in-a-lifetime multi-media, multi-cultural learning experience. It was what school should have been, could have been. Of course, going there all by myself at age eleven may have been dangerous. A policeman had, indeed, come to the school to warn us girls about the danger of being kidnapped into white slavery. I imagined myself being forced to wield a pick ax in the Arctic somewhere and made a mental note to watch out for evil-looking Boris and Natasha types, especially around the Russian Pavilion.

I can't imagine how I got such an odd idea about "white slavery" but, to be fair, schools weren't used to explaining heavy issues back in those days. Things were hushed up, left unspoken. These were the 60's. Real problems weren't dealt with at school, just improper behavior. Stand in line quietly, sit up straight, don't run in the schoolyard, don't talk, don't move, don't breath... This is what I recall most about elementary school. Rules. I seldom broke any, but by the time I finished high school, an honors student and a teacher's pet, I vowed to never put my own children through that indignity. I'd homeschool them. Anything. There must be a better way.

But then I had children. And the time came for the eldest to enter school. And I was anxious for him to start. I wanted him to fly. I wanted him to soar. Above all, I wanted him to fit in. I wandered the sunny halls of our local school during Open House and noticed how much things have changed. The classrooms appeared in upheaval, some downright messy. (Being a slob myself, I liked that!) The school's halls were awash in color, not bleak and cold as I remembered my old school. Kids didn't wear uniforms. They wore T-shirts which were scintillating billboards for the icons of popular culture Levis, Ninja Turtles, Barbie. The school yard was a vast green expanse where kids ran and played, not a small encaged bit of macadam, policed to the hilt. And what I liked the best was that the desks weren't in rows, at least not in kindergarten and not in grade one. They were in circles. "We WANT the children to learn to communicate at this stage," explained Mrs. W., the kindergarten teacher. "We WANT them to talk to each other."

And parents were welcomed into the school all year round. Grandparents, too! They were welcomed as lunchtime supervisors and library volunteers. The could join Home and School, or School Committee, or Orientation Committee. They could help out on field trips and with remedial reading. I don't recall ever seeing a parent walking the halls at my old school.

I didn't become a volunteer in my son's school right away. It seems I carried too much baggage with respect to school; I still felt uneasy in those halls. I may stand five foot and eleven inches, but four-foot-eleven Ms. J., my son's second grade teacher, could make me feel like a shy little girl all over again!

Over the years I've slowly inched my way in. I started in the library, because libraries, children's libraries especially, make me feel happy. Soon I was attending Home-and-School meetings and last year I even volunteered as a reading partner for second graders and as an English tutor.

Yes, I was relieved to find, school has changed over the years, but there is definitely a downside to all of this wonderful change. Teachers tell me that discipline has declined over the years; kids today have little respect for authority. They tell me how budgets are so low there's no money for textbooks and that they are always being asked to "do more with less." Many teachers are burnt out, exhausted. But these problems are nothing when compared to their Number One concern troubled kids. Perhaps just one or two per grade, this tiny group of usually disadvantaged children ruins it for everyone else, consuming all of the teachers' energy and time with their acting out. These children can be spotted in kindergarten, the teachers tell us, but only a few are saved. I was shocked this year, working as a tutor, to read some of the older boys' compositions. They were so violent! They read like video games, full of killing wrenched out of any moral context. "Do you accept this kind of thing, today?" I asked a teacher. "Well, as long as they are writing we are happy, " he said.

The classrooms are inclusive today, with slower kids and troubled kids mixed in with the gifted and those children performing at grade level. I wonder how I would have fared in such a classroom. Would I have just faded into the background?

Last June, after a series of incidents of flagrant aggression against my kids in the classroom and on the playground, I asked Ms. L., the school Principal "Are my kids magnets for these troubled kids?"

"No, of course, not," she answered. "All the parents complain about the same few kids." And then she added something very telling. "You know," she said, "It only gets worse in June. These kids really start acting up before school ends. It's because they don't want to go home for the summer."

"They don't want to go home." That sentence has been haunting me all summer. These children spend all of their time at school in the office or in the halls getting disciplined, yet they don't want to leave.

It's August, Back to School --- already. So soon. Seems just yesterday that my Andrew and Mark were diving into the white caps off White Point Beach Resort in Nova Scotia yelling, "Take that, Neptune!"

I ask them if they are anxious to go back to school as they sit slumped on the couch slurping popsicles. "Yea," they answer, languidly. Sure, why not? School's cool. All their friends are at school. And they are anxious to learn whose class they will be in. No problem. No big deal.

No great expectations for my kids. No big disappointments either. I guess it's better that way.

1999© Dorothy Nixon, all rights reserved