Dear Grands, The last letter I wrote about school I was finishing first grade. Now here is what I can remember about my second and third grades.
Aerobics with Miss Nina in the Second Grade
Second grade found me in the room of Mrs. Nina Toms, known affectionately as Miss Nina, although she was a Mrs. Nina. What stands out most of my memory of second grade was what perfect posture Miss Nina had. She always stood up very straight and urged us to do so as well. In fact, every day we did a regimen of a sort of calisthenics where she had us stand up and go through different exercises. One exercise required that we stand up on our toes and reach for the ceiling, and we would take deep breaths and exhale. She was way ahead of her time in that respect. Second graders doing aerobics in 1944-45, perhaps unprecedented! This was in addition to our recess which was held outdoors. There should be more of this in the classrooms of second graders today IMHO.
She was a rather strict teacher, and if someone misbehaved she would make them go to the blackboard and draw a circle a bit higher than their head on the board, and then the naughty child would have to stand on tiptoes and keep his nose in the circle. Maybe that was why she had us doing exercises every day. I watched jealously as I saw my classmates, mainly boys, going to the board for this “activity”. I was usually a very obedient and polite child, but once I thought it might be fun to have to plant my nose in a circle on the blackboard. So I deliberately did something for which I was chastised, and bingo I was up at the blackboard with my nose in a circle. I would sometimes try to look around and face the class while still standing on tiptoes, but without my nose in the circle, obviously. I giggled quietly and tried to get my classmates to giggle too. I had to be quick, because as soon as I saw Miss Nina turning around towards me, back in the circle went my nose. I have to tell you standing on tiptoes and keeping your nose in a circle was not easy. I didn’t misbehave again.
Third Grade and Changing Classes: Not students but teachers
My first cousin, Virginia Greene, who was eighteen years older than I became one of my third-grade teachers. I guess you would say she was my “homeroom teacher.” She was a talented musician in voice and piano and had recently graduated from Meredith College and had studied at the Julliard School of Music in New York City. Her father was my father’s oldest brother, and his family lived across the railroad tracks from our house, but in the summers when she was home I could sometimes hear Virginia going through her warm-ups for singing. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah”, and then a key higher “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah” and so on. Then she would burst into song that carried beautifully through the air to where I was outside climbing trees or chasing butterflies. Music was never a talent of mine.
I had to call her Miss Greene, which seemed unnatural to me, since I had always called her Virginia. She was actually hired as the music teacher for the school. So off she would go to some other class to teach them music while their teacher would come to our room to teach us some subject. I can’t remember all the teachers and what subjects they taught, but I remember the math teacher, I think a Mrs. Brown. We were learning our multiplication tables and she would divide the class into two teams for arithmetic “baseball”. The first person would go to “bat” and they would be given an arithmetic problem, like 5 x 4. If the student got it right she would move to first base, and this would continue until there were three misses (or outs) and the home scores would be tallied. During that arithmetic class, we also learned to count money using play money we had made. A “store” was set up in the room where we would be pretending to buy things. Students had to take their turns as clerks and shoppers.
In the spring of that year near the end of the school term, all the classes participated in a program out on the playground that parents could attend. We third graders were Chinese and our Mamas made us little pajamas that resembled kimonos, and we had some kind of black “rat” in our hair to resemble a Chinese hairstyle. We performed some kind of dance and song.
Love, GrandPat
April 7, 2020
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