School Daze

Forgive me, dear readers. I have written before about how excited I got as a kid when the new school year began. In nearly thirteen years of columnizing, way north of six hundred Fridays, there’s bound to be some repetition.

Besides, the entire concept of “school” keeps shape-shifting, so there’s always something new to write.

My dear late Mother was a first and second grade (combined) teacher in a tiny rural South Dakota town. She loved to tell me about her first day of teaching in 1942 when the mothers brought their little charges to her kind care: “Now Peggy sometimes has epileptic fits, so it’s important that she not bite her tongue off. Keep these tongue depressors in your desk.” “William is shy and will not look directly at you. Also, he sometimes wets his pants, so I’m going to leave you with some extra pants.” And so on… She said every kid had a cautionary story attached and she was scared to death.

In Teachers’ College, then called Normal School, she had learned how to teach children to sound out words to read, to memorize poems, and to do arithmetic. There were also units on Geography and History, age-appropriate for first or second grade.

Naturally, she wore a nice dress or skirt, blouse and jacket every single day. Every day started with the children standing, facing the flag, little hands over hearts, to say the Pledge of Allegiance and then being seated with their hands folded to bow their heads and say The Lord’s Prayer.

She taught with love and patience and not one child was unable to read when he or she left First Grade. In 2011, when I drove her to a nearby town’s 115^th anniversary celebration, several of her former students came over to express their love and thanks and hug her, saying, “Miss Terry! You haven’t changed a bit!” She was 90 at that time.

In all the time I knew her, children adored her and felt safe with her. She was a Kid Whisperer who could quiet screaming toddlers in Walmart just by speaking to them. Many the time I saw an unhappy child put out both arms and go to her right there in the cereal aisle as the mother looked on in a mixture of apprehension, amazement and relief. I tried to warn her that someday she could get in trouble, but it never happened.

When I started kindergarten in 1951, teaching methods had not changed dramatically. Praise God, they were still teaching phonics, memorizing the times tables with flashcards, coloring maps. The vast majority of my teachers were good to excellent with one exception which I have discussed many times before and does not bear revisiting. Only to say she clearly hated children in general, me in particular, and delighted in tormenting nine-year-olds. I spent a great deal of fourth grade standing in the hall, which suited me fine.

I think one of the things I loved most about those first few days of the new school year was the fresh start – the chance to make new friends, new efforts, new resolutions to be a better student. Even in college, I preferred the Quarter to the Semester system, because you got an extra fresh start each year.

Also, since for some inexplicable reason, we were only allowed to take three books a week out of the Public Library, when school started, then I could check out another three from the School Library. We didn’t have television until I was in 7^th grade, and I routinely read a book a day from first through sixth grade. This is why I possess so darn much smartocity. Lol.

The excitement of returning to school would build until Labor Day. Over that weekend, we would often go to Minneapolis to shop for new school clothes in Dayton’s Basement (everything on Clearance!) and, if it wasn’t too hot, take in one day of The State Fair.

And then, it was off to school with all your supplies fresh and unspoiled. Pencils sharpened, crayons unbroken. You had your clean new Big Chief Tablet – now undoubtedly verboten and replaced by stupid super-heroes. You had your box of Crayolas.

Even though when you looked up “thrifty” in the Dictionary, there was a picture of my mother, I always got the big box of 64 crayons with the sharpener right on the box. Daddy owned a drugstore and he saw to it that I got the best crayons money could buy, wholesale!

Joe’s mother made my mother’s spending look like a sailor on shore leave, and he only got the box with 8 colors, or in a welcome moment of maternal distraction, the box of 16. To this day, he cannot recognize “puce” “magenta” or “periwinkle”, even though the latter is one of my favorite colors and the color of our laundry room.

Junior High and High School featured quite a few more male teachers. A lot of them were World War Two and Korea vets and they put up with little nonsense. The ladies had to wear dresses – not even pants suits yet – and the men wore coats and ties and only on the hottest days in the un-airconditioned school did they loosen their ties, remove their coats and roll their dress shirts up to the elbows. Standards! What a concept. Also, not one teacher, married or single, ever mentioned a single thing about his or her sex life or proclivities, thank the Lord.

Moving on to the next generation: Even when our son, now 53, was in elementary school, it seemed that not all that much had changed. His first-grade teacher was named Miss Rott, (pronounced Rote) and I pictured an older unsmiling woman in a bun. I worked nights typesetting and Joe took him to school the first day. When I asked our son about his teacher, he said she was really nice. I asked if she was young or old and he said, “Mommy! She’s OLD, like you.” (I was 32).

At first Conference, I discovered Miss Rott was, in fact, 22, just out of college. She did a good job and was very fond of our kid. A couple of years later, she married and had a baby boy she named after our son. He was very proud.

I became a standup comic in the early 80s and initially one of my favorite audiences was teachers. They were attentive, got the jokes and were pleasant to be around. But about halfway through my career – mid-90s and beyond – things went downhill like Merle Haggard’s “snowball headed for Hell.” It was like a switch had been flipped which coincided with the deadly combo plate of Political Correctness and early incarnations of DEI (which started as Affirmative Action.)

Evidently instead of the Normal School of my mother’s day, teachers’ college had morphed into Abby Normal School. The women became markedly slovenly, unkempt, humorless, hostile and on guard for any joke that could in any way be considered “offensive,” at which they would literally hiss. I stopped taking the gigs. I had better ways to shorten my life.

The last job I accepted before retiring to Arizona was for a rural district’s teachers’ instructional day a few days before classes resumed. I was the last speaker of the day. We were running late. The obligatory Diversity Drone coming in from St. Paul was a Mexican woman who (I am not making this up) arrived 90 minutes late for her talk about how terrible it was that black and Hispanic students were not doing as well as the white kids. And somehow, that meant it must be the teachers’ or society’s or for sure white people’s fault.

I said, “I have an idea about how to make all the outcomes the same. Instead of worrying about the students of color lagging behind, why not just convince the white kids to do worse?”

Fortunately, steam does not literally come out of one’s ears. When it was finally my turn, I did my usual comedy for the first 30 minutes. It was going well and then I said, “I have an idea about how to make all the outcomes the same. Instead of worrying about the students of color lagging behind, why not just convince the white kids to do worse?”

There was first a dead silence. And then a most satisfying explosive roar of laughter and clapping by the teachers. Almost as if they had finally been given “permission” to tell the truth. The Diversity Drone from St. Paul, looked daggers at me. I consider it a highlight of my life.

And now, even those look like The Good Olde Days. Now, instead of a mother telling a new teacher that she must watch for a pants-wetter, she may inform that teacher that her kid is non-binary and needs to be referred to as a boy on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and a girl on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That her other kid (pronouns they/them) is a furry who will be bringing his own litter box. You can’t even make up anything as crazy as reality now.

The teacher will be tattooed, pierced, with crazy eyes and with hair a color not found in Nature. (Some of the nicest people I know sport one or more of these qualities except for the crazy eyes. Those are a dead give-away.)

When I read that in Minnesota – of COURSE in Minnesota, yeesh! – there is a dispute about putting anatomically correct dolls with interchangeable private parts into kindergartens so the wee ones can experiment with gender “fluidity,” I said, “somebody is making this [stuff] up!” Please, God. But, alas, it was real.

If the parents put up with that, then it will truly mean The End Of The World As We Know It. Just for openers, the notion that changing your sex is as easy and painless as swapping out one plastic part for another, is false to the rotten core.

Let’s force the teachers to tell the children the truth: that such grotesque mutilation involves a million dollars, a world of pain, permanent sterility, and lifelong maintenance. And that no matter what mutilation or hormonal torture they inflict upon themselves, they will still, always and forever be the SEX they were born. And that there are two of those, period.

And if the school system fights the parents on that, then they should take the kids out of the schools and home-school them. And hire a forensic auditor to make sure the schools are not counting all those absent kids to get the grotesque State money spent on each child, but in reality, squandered on Administrators, Racist Bean-Counters, and Speech Minders. (Those monies range from c. $11,000 in Idaho to $33,000 per pupil in Washington, D.C.)

It would be a crying shame if those obscene dolls ended up in a burning dumpster along with all the tampons from the boys’ restroom. Not that I am for a minute advocating such a thing. But, I have been reliably informed that sometimes things DO spontaneously combust from Climate Change.