My first grade teacher: An unforgettable year

Font Size:

| Thursday, August 21, 2008 |

Bill Wundram

SOME people are not to be forgotten, like your first grade teacher.

Kids are so much more ready for first grade these days. When they grow up, I bet they will never forget their first grade teacher.

My first grade teacher was Miss Phillips. I believed that she lived in the classroom and slept in a cubbyhole somewhere off the furnace room. She was prim, proper — and scared the dickens out of me. After the first couple of days, no wonder.

MY MOTHER walked me to school on my first day. That was embarrassing because I was afraid the boys would think I was a sissy. School was a bulky building called Buchanan. It still stands, a storehouse with lots of weeds on what was our playground.

We hung our sweaters in the tall-ceiling coat room, a narrow passage that was a part of every old school. There were brass coat hooks, which I could never reach, and memory serves that a little girl named Betty Ann Kahl helped me reach the hook. This was not a prosperous end of town, so some kids carried their lunches in empty half-gallon Karo syrup tin pails.

“You will learn the alphabet by your last names,” I remember Miss Phillips saying. “Your name begins with ‘W’ so you will sit in the last back seat of the room.” That was not a very inspiring start for my education.

I always thought of Miss Phillips as being an old woman. Probably, she was about 30, but that was ancient to a 5-year-old. For all that I remember, in first grade we were to learn everything that was to be learned, including penmanship, addition and singing.

To get things off to a friendly start, Miss Phillips asked us to stand and tell what we wanted to be when we grew up. All the boys wanted to be firemen or policemen. The girls wanted to be teachers or nurses. When I told her that I wanted to drive a dirigible, she must have thought that I must be some kind of knothead.

We were handed pencils and pads of lined paper. There were examples of cursive letters, in a long black strip, on top of the blackboard. We were to emulate them. I struggled and was scolded. None of the class was catching on by the third or fourth day, so she harshly said, “You will all stay after school until you get things right.” Such attitude would not be tolerated in the first grades of today. Miss Phillips was especially critical of me, so I began to cry.

This was disturbing all the other first grade kids, so she said, “Billy, I know you are trying,” and scooted me out the door to go home.

MY COMBAT with cursive writing worsened. Miss Phillips blamed it on my being left-handed. Left-handed was some kind of curse, and if I switched, some said I would stutter. Never the mind, Miss Phillips tried to make me right-handed and would slap my left hand with a ruler when I wrote. Once, the metal rim of the ruler caught my left pointer finger and there is still a scar.

Oh, first grade was a terrible year to endure. I moved on to second grade where there was a saint of a teacher who made all of us feel comfortable. I remember her name, too, Marjorie Donegan. She was very young and I fell in love with her. She may have been tall or short; I can’t remember, but she was lovely, a movie star in the eyes of a kid who was only going on 6.

As you meander through life, think back. Who was your first grade teacher? He or she probably had more of an influence than you think.

Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.