Look what I found from a box I sorted out. Grandma's letter. She wrote to my daughter, Tamra.
Dear Tammy,
I'm sorry that I haven't written to you about when I went to school. I'm not very good at getting letters written.
The grade (elementary) school I went to was different than what most elementary schools were then. Mine was a small country school, but it was bigger than other country schools in the same county. It was called the Clinton School. We had grades K-8th in our school.
There were two rooms, one was for K-4th grades, and one was for 5th-8th grades. We had one teacher for each room. That teacher taught everything; math, Lanugage, History, Reading, and Art. We did not have any Music or PE classes.
Sometimes there would be only one student in a grade level or there may have been as many as 8 students in a grade. Mine had Janet Shuster, Carol Jensen, Marcene SunBear, Ron Tauson, and me. Some years there may have been another kid for part of the school year, these were the ones I went to school with from Kindergarten through 8th grade.
We had one recess in the morning, lunch recess, and one afternoon recess. We did things like playing on the swings, slide, merry-go-round, or games ( soft ball, tag, running contests, etc) or jumped rope, hop scotch. The teachers wouldn't let us just sit and talk during recess.
Most of the years we had to take our lunches with us but the last few years we had a hot lunch program. We had really good lunches, my neighbor lady was the cook and she was realy good. She made things like fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on a cob or some other vegetable and we always had cookies, pie, or cake for desert. We had fresh mik every day, too.
Almost everyone walked to school or biked, a few kids who lived on farms over a mile away were driven by their parents. I don't remember having any snow days, because our teachers would stay at the school during the bad weather days. There was a little apartment in the basement for the teachers to stay, if they wanted to.
We had a janitor, his name was Fred Fankhouser, he was such a nice man. He could fix anything. Kids would bring all kinds of toys and different things to him that needed fixed.
He was great about listening to problems too I think he helped a lot of kids by just listening to them.
The teachers were very strict You had to have your homework ready to turn in every day or you got an F for that day in that subject. There were no second chances to make up any bad grades on daily work or tests They would really let you know they were unhappy if you didn't get your work done. If you didn't understand something most of them were great about helping you, once in a while we would have a crabby teacher who would be kind of mean and make you feel like a dummy.
Continued......
