“Miss Wilma”

One of my favorite people of all time is Miss Wilma. Miss Wilma was my teacher in the little three room elementary school I attended back in smalltown. She walked with a cane because she had been born with a birth defect that caused her to be bent forward at the waist. Despite her physical frailness, Miss Wilma had a passion for children and took great delight in helping them prepare for a brighter future. I heard her say many times, “It’s not where you come from in life, but it’s what you choose to do in preparation for the future ahead of you that’s important.”  Though I had teachers before her, I credit Miss Wilma for giving me an insatiable desire to learn. She taught me how to do longhand math,  how to read and write and to understand that it is what people do, it’s not what they say, that determines whether a person is trustworthy or not. That last lesson was a difficult lesson for me to learn because I was a little rascal of a boy so to speak, but Miss Wilma understood me perhaps better than any other person I have known. Despite my shortcomings, she never gave up on me and treated me as if I was a perfect child. I had an opportunity a few years later to tell her face to face how much I appreciated the love and patience she showed  me during my learning years.  A few short years after our face to face meeting she went home to be with her Lord.

Since leaving smalltown behind, I have traveled across America from one coast to the other and have made a couple of observations concerning changes in education that I am not altogether convinced were good ones. Call me old fashion if you like, but one such change I observed was the invention and later subsequent use of mechanical devices for the advancement of scholastic skills in our modern day classrooms. I’ll bet some of you older people have noticed too, that many young people who seek solutions to math problems using a mechanical device that does the thinking for them have a difficult time making correct change.

The subtracting of a lower number from a higher number without the aid of a mechanical device with a digital readout seems to confuse them. It is my belief, “the skill of mental calculation was lost during the transition period between doing math by longhand and learning to use mechanical devices that does the thinking for us.”

I think most of you will agree the mechanical method of solving math problems is quicker than the longhand method because mental calculations require thought, and thinking requires time, and since a lot of people today say, “they don’t have time,” leads me to believe, that a lot of people have pretty much quick thinking for themselves.  OTBP

“Growing up in America”

I grew up in America during a time when families were large and most every family had four or more children. That was in a bygone age before abortion became legal and the family shrunk to less then two children per family. According to present day national statistics there are now 1.11 children per family in America not counting the illegal immigrants that are swamping our country and keeping that magic number of children at 2.1 per household that is needed for a country to survive another fifty years. In my particular family there were nine children and I was eighth in the birth order. Back then every mother I knew with the exception of a few who were teachers or secretaries worked in her home caring for her family. I was fortunate that my mother worked in the home.

I called our home, “Mom’s University” because that is where each of her nine children received their education in manners, responsibility, and how to treat others. It was during the evening meal and around our supper table that most of mom’s teaching took place because that was the time of day when every family member was present. No one in our family missed supper and the time mom spent teaching her children right from wrong. My mother didn’t have a teaching degree or a PhD in Education like most people must have today to prove they are qualified to teach in their field of expertise, but she was the smartest person I knew. Where did my mother get her unique teaching abilities? At her mother’s knee, just like her mother had before her. Back then family values were passed down from one generation to the next. Mother’s didn’t depend upon public television to teach their children how to read, count, or share. They took that responsibility upon themselves and the older children assisted them.

I took my daughter on a trip back through time last Father’s Day and visited all the houses I lived in during my childhood that were still standing. After visiting the last one, I asked her, “Did you find any one thing all of these houses had in common?” She was quick to tell me, “They were all very small.” Which was true. I never lived in a big house during my childhood. Most houses were small and families were close back then. No one I knew had their own room to escape to if we didn’t like what was on the radio or television. We went outside and invented a game to play to keep ourselves amused. We didn’t have air conditioning to cool the house in the summer, or a thermostat to turn up the heat in the winter if the house was too cold. Most people didn’t have indoor plumbing, they had a number three wash tub to bathe in and when nature called we used an outdoor privy some fifty feet from the house. Somehow we all managed to survive our meager surrounding and grow up to become responsible adults. In the summer we went barefoot and wore shorts and took our baths in the local swimming hole and no one thought we were strange. And on those long winter nights we slept three to a bed to stay warm – and on the really cold nights we added another blanket or two on the bed to ward off the cold wind that blew through the cracks between the weather boarding. The next day we added an extra layer of clothing before we went outdoors to play or do our chores.

We were tough kids and patriotic to the bone. We loved to fight, baseball, and mom’s apple pie. We were taught to be respectful and on parade days when the American flag went by, we stood up straight and watched it until it turned the corner out of sight. We respected our teachers and recited the Pledge of Allegiance everyday before classes began in classrooms where we were taught how to think for ourselves. Every boy owned a GI Joe toy soldier, a cap pistol and holster, and a BB gun. We didn’t shoot out too many of our friends eyes with them and the whippings we received on our little behinds with those willow branches cut off the tree in the yard did nothing to harm our little egos. We were America’s youth and damm proud of it! OTBP