Raise your hand if you went to a one-room-school. Not everyone can make that claim, but a number of us are still around.
I went to a school like the one you see on “Little House on the Prairie.” What’s more is that I often walked the mile and a half gravel road to school and loved it. Not so much in the mornings but in the afternoons when I could dawdle on my way home. It was almost impossible to get lost on the flat South Dakota prairie and its neatly surveyed sections and quarter sections, so I dawdled.
The school district had no buses. Students walked, rode bikes or finagled rides. On bad weather days, the fathers took turns carpooling, so we children of that era suffered no hardships. I liked walking. I also loved riding my bike to school.
I attended “Sunflower” school where the role of bullies was filled to overflowing. Students in grades 1-8 attended and this shouldn’t have been a problem except that the teacher was only 18 and very attractive. Some of the farm boys repeating 8th grade were as old as 16. Needless to say, they weren’t big fans of the educational system or to put it bluntly, they terrorized the teacher.
Not only that, but everyone was out of control. I have memories of students climbing on the school roof and wild running games at recess. One boy in my grade was a bed-wetter and you can imagine the treatment he received by the older kids.
Things got so bad, the district superintendent finally visited and got together with parents who volunteered to drop in unexpectedly. Finally things quieted down somewhat. Still, with 20-25 students in different grades, days were never calm.
But I survived first and second grades and even learned to read before another school, closer to home, opened, the Schartner School, named after the family who donated the land. My third grade was spent there. Unfortunately, I did not get along with my teacher.
The Schartner School was small. Students numbered six. By now, my sister was in first grade. I was in third. Another girl my age joined me. Her brother was in 5th grade and boy-girl twins were in my sister’s class. You’d think no problems would exist, but I noticed that the teacher favored the twins and thought she picked on my sister.
What does a kid do? The teacher was in her early twenties and no pushover, so I resorted to open rebellion.
If the teacher asked me to do something, I did the opposite. If she asked me not to do something, I did it.
I discovered that the teacher couldn’t abide certain habits like eraser chewing, so I chewed with zeal. She’d punish me. I’d chew another eraser. The battle finally came to a head when she made me chew an onion as punishment.
My dad stepped in, and that was the end of that. So much for the good old days!
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