Hanging Out with Grandpat in the Fourth Grade

Letters to my Grands:  

Fourth Grade at Lattimore Elementary School

Miss Lyda Poston, a tall and lanky woman who had once played basketball in high school was the, shall I say, notorious fourth-grade teacher.  She was well-loved even though she was known as a rather strict disciplinarian. Over each of the two doors that one would enter or exit the room was a chinning bar, and each time a student passed through the door, she would have to chin.  Even going out for lunch or recess, we had to line up and each person would chin and then go through the door.  We could do it pretty fast after a few weeks of practice.

 

Miss Poston's coupe except it didn't have white-walled tires. 

Miss Poston drove a black coupe with a rumble seat in which she would arrive each morning.  I often wondered how she with her long legs could fit into that car.  How I hoped that one day I would miss my bus and Miss Poston would have to take me home.  “Please may I ride in the rumble seat, Miss Poston?” Never happened.

Geography was introduced as a subject in fourth grade and we had a book devoted just to geography.  The one thing I remember was we studied the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and Mesopotamia the Fertile Crescent that lay between those two rivers.  We even put on a program in the auditorium of the high school where we were dressed as Arabs and we ate dates.  I had never eaten dates before, and as a fourth-grader, I did NOT like them.  (I like them very much now.) When the Iraq war happened and I read about the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers it reminded me of my fourth-grade geography class.

Polio was running rampant during the 1940s, and President Roosevelt himself had polio.  He started a campaign to raise money for research into finding a vaccine for polio.  He figured that even during the depression anyone could afford a dime.  At school, we were given little cards, with slots for placing dimes, and we would collect as many as we could.  I would get a few from my Daddy, and maybe one from Grandma and maybe one or two from Aunt Emma. I would always try to fill up the card before I turned it into the teacher.  These would be mailed to the March of Dimes headquarters.

 My little sister, Martha, entered the first grade this year, and she was assigned to a teacher that I thought was not the best teacher. So every morning I would take her to the other classroom and would tell her to stay there in Miss Magness’s room.  Of course every morning she would be taken back to the room to which she was assigned.  For some reason, I thought Miss Magness was the better teacher and I wanted Martha to be in her classroom.  Finally, I saw that she would not be in Miss Magness’s room so I gave up.

 Martha was very unhappy with school during the first days and because her room was diagonal across from my fourth-grade class, frequently her teacher would come to get me to go sit with Martha when she was upset.  I hated that.  First of all, I did not want to miss what was going in my classroom.  Secondly, I had outgrown the small chairs that were used in the first grades and it was very uncomfortable for me to sit there.   Finally, she became accustomed to school and I was relieved of my duty as a big sister comforter.