I’m more aware of schooling right now due to Diane Ravitch’s blog, and the fact that so many local homes in my current home town have “No Megaschool” signs in their yards.  I recall no mean teachers or classmates. School was a source of being able to pat the dust from blackboard chalk erasers, performing on stage in programs singing You Are My Sunshine when parents were invited,   May Day and Play Day activities, debating club, newspaper and yearbook staff,  tennis team,  art classes, honor society and even (especially lucky in Miami), radio speech.    I remember Mrs. Robbins in the sixth grade telling me how nice I looked when I wore sweaters with white collars sticking out. I was also a Safety Patrol  girl and Janet Rich and I collaborated on a winning poster, winning an unabridged dictionary for our sixth grade class at Midwood Elementary in Charlotte.  I recall confessing to chewing gum on my safety patrol post there and getting my just demerit for it.

 I even remember (or fantasized) that a teacher at Miami High School cheated for me out of the kindness of her heart. It happened like this:  I attended the first day of the eleventh grade at East High in Charlotte  and the second day of the eleventh grade at Columbia High in  Columbia, S.C., where I attended school until Christmas vacation, when we moved to Miami, Florida.  Miami High School was one month away from the end of first semester, and the school would not accept my credentials from South Carolina. They had studied a different curriculum, and I wouldn’t get credit for the entire first semester unless I could learn and pass the end of semester test.  That month I did little but study, and did barely pass.  Afterwards I counted up my score in math and the teacher had made an error in totalling my correct answers.  She counted one more correct than I did.  At least I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut about it.    So I had passed first semester and then transferred to Miami Jackson High, where I joined the tennis team the next year, as a senior.    It’s true that in the twelfth grade I qualified for free lunches and worked part-time for a nice company and no one attended my graduation but a friend and her step-father while my parents divorced, but school and its teachers were an unadulterated plus.

 Years and years later, I was in a singles group which engaged in white water rafting on the New River and camped together in West Virginia, across the Ohio River from Athens,  and around the campfire we sang “Dixie.”  Two of us sang louder than most, and we  discovered that friend Reid Huntley and I were both from North Carolina, both attended Alexander Graham Junior High, both were in the same seventh grade class, and both had Miss Lummus for homeroom teacher!  After seventh  grade I moved on, but Reid dug out some year books containing students I had known well both at A.G. but also from earlier at Myers Park Elementary, grades 2-4).   Summer after the fourth grade was the polio epidemic and I was smuggled away at night to family in Chevy Chase, Md., where they lawfully kept me in quarrantine, and I stayed for fifth grade.  (My little sister had contracted polio at the time, but suffered no long-lasting effects fortunately).

 What a WEIRD experience for all those faces which had been buried deep in my memory to come popping up full blown in the year books Reid showed me!! Such old friends Ann Knight, Emily Cozart. Ann Robinson and cute petite Hope Jarrell.  Even Ann N., whom I considered stuck-up because she said she never wore a sweater twice but what it was dry-cleaned. At that point I don’t think I had ever worn anything that was dry-cleaned. She also had a quilted skirt after which I lusted.  And Reid had been friends with Murray Heath, upon whom I had had a secret crush,  and who appeared in my diary that very year (7th grade).