A friend and I drove up to Lakeshore Elementary School a few months ago, pulled into the circular drive by the flagpole (still there!), and reminisced a bit about our early school days. The mysteriously-named school, which is in sight of neither a lake nor a shore, looked nearly the same except, (swear!) they somehow had shrunk the cafeteria! What had been cavernous and in memory, plastered with Fire Prevention Week posters, was now the size of my neighbor’s 3-car garage. “That’s just amazing!” I said, and we stared at each other in mutual confirmation that this strange phenomenon had in fact happened.
My first-grade teacher was Mrs. Bush, probably in her sixties at the time, and I didn’t love her, but I did love learning, which spilled over onto her. Isn’t it funny how that works? Love of learning becomes love of teacher, serving the dependent becomes love of your babies. Proximity becomes love of the familiar? That last one is a researchable brain thing. We tend to love those we live with or see a great deal whether or not we would love them in other circumstances. Before you think about that too much (seriously, you may not want to go there), let me give you an easy example: like work families. As novelist Ocean Vuong says, there are families you are born into, found-families you create from friends, and families of circumstance, and we bond with them all. At least for a time.
I could add here that research shows we also have a subliminal, involuntary preference for people whose names start with the same letter as our own, but I digress.
I felt very comfortable with Mrs. Bush— occasionally embarrassing myself by calling out, “Mom” when I raised my hand. But the magic began when we broke into reading groups—thinly-disguised, grossly-inaccurate estimations of our potential–Red Birds, Blue Birds, and just well, Birds. I can prove this distinction was bogus as I know several Blue Birds who grew up to be so wildly successful, they could buy and sell Red Birds a thousand times over.
Like 80 percent of American schoolchildren at the time, we were learning to read through the adventures of Dick and his sidekick, Jane. The siblings-simple also possessed the spunky Spot—and eventually added “Baby” to the family. This was the era of the Whole-Word teaching method, which later fell out of vogue—beginning with a Life Magazine article questioning how children could be inspired to read with insipid content.
But I, for one, aspired to insipid. I envied the very symmetrical, always-smiling, banal family of four featured in our Readers. “Fun with Dick and Jane” looked fun because it was benign, because it was wholesome. All bets were off with those crazy kids in the sequel, “Dick and Jane Go, Go, Go!”
Discredited or not, I remember the incredulity of watching letters become words. It was as magical as Helen Keller at the well when Annie Sullivan spelled w-a-t-e-r into her palm and she abruptly understood that those movements were a symbol that identified a thing–the rush of wetness spilling from the well pump she could neither hear nor see. It was like that—the moment letters became words I too could see the world. Now everything was accessible.
Learning to read quickly morphed to the delight of learning to print, then to write in cursive (the sole purpose of which is to let us print faster). Did you know there was a time in ancient Greece when a thriving civilization forgot how to write? For centuries?
From 1100 BC to 800 BC, the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations deteriorated, and Greece entered its Late Bronze Age Collapse and subsequent Dark Age. Many skills, including writing, were lost because there was no longer a need for record-keeping. Humanity had to invent writing all over again like coming back from an extinction event.
Though we would like to believe otherwise, maybe there is nothing that can’t be forgotten.
Perhaps Lakeshore Elementary once looked over a lake, the name, now the only way we might know.
We passed notes there in secret to classmates we thought we’d remember.
I like you.
Do you like me?
Check yes or no.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
Matthew Tobriner says
Really a good piece. I bet that 90% of those asked will remember the name of the teacher who taught them how to read. And for good reason –so they can say thankyou.
Laura Oliver says
What an interesting thought! We say, “Do you remember your first grade teacher, and we all do, but what we are primarily asking, is “Do you remember the person who taught you to read?” Thanks for that perspective. I love it.
John says
It wasn’t my first grade teacher who taught me to read but my mother. If you found yourself learning to read by the time you entered school, you were already behind…