Teachers Learn Early

When you are a new teacher, you learn immediately that you are old.  My first realization of this was when I said to my class, "You know, that was when John F. Kennedy was assassinated."  I was greeted by totally blank faces.  That was before they were born, long before.

Here are some other things I get funny looks for saying:

There were 48 stars on the flag when I started school.

I was alive when Laura Ingalls Wilder died.

I went home for lunch most days until I was a senior in high school.  In grade school we weren't allowed to stay for lunch if you lived within a certain distance from school.

Walking to and from school was an event!

Children went outside unsupervised for recess.  The teacher stayed by the window and watched while he/she graded papers.  This was also true in my first few years of teaching.

Girls had to wear dresses to school each day.  If it was cold, we wore corduroy pants under our dresses and took them off when we got to school.  That changed at sometime and slacks could be worn.

We played at the park all day without our parents there.  We took off on our bikes and came home when the noon whistle blew, the five o'clock whistle blew, and the street lights came on.  We didn't do anything wrong, because we knew everyone who lived by the park and they would tell our parents AND our parents would believe them.

We rode our bikes over the teeter-totters.  If we went slowly, it was a bridge, quickly, it was a ramp. That may be why they put handles on teeter-totters today, if the park's insurance allows them to be in parks.

I ran errands for my mom.  The grocery store was close and I could go the library by myself, too. Sometimes, I was allowed to spend a penny on a piece of candy.  Otherwise, we collected pop bottles to redeem for cash.  (Don't lecture me about recycling.)

The hardware store close to us left appliance boxes out for kids to take.  We asked permission, but the answer was always, "Yes."  That gave us days of fun, at least until it rained.

I watched "Leave it to Beaver" and "Andy Griffith" when they were first run.

I can remember when we got our first colored television--families had only one television.  If our television broke, we called a repairman to come to our house or Dad took the tubes to the drug store to test to see which one needed to be replaced.  That didn't seem to work well.

I do not want to overwhelm you with more of my shocking memories, but I must add the footnote that the man who was mayor of Napoleon, Ohio, at the time we lived there, had designed the 50 star flag.

May the Lord bless and keep you!