Yesterday was the first day of the 2023-2024 school year in my county in rural Georgia, and I left early to avoid the heavy traffic on the one day of the year when it seems every parent drives their kids to school. While my role in the school system has changed from that of a classroom teacher, I still enjoy the energy of the first day of school in any of our school buildings. Backpacks are new, everyone has a pencil, and you can tell by the soles of all the shoes that back-to-school shopping yielded the newest fashionable kicks. Everyone is showered and clean – and mostly well-behaved, since everyone is still outside their comfort zone and a little uncertain of consequence on all the boundaries they haven’t tested just yet. And by everyone, I mean students, parents, teachers, and administrators – all of us!
It’s fascinating to me to read through Gladys Taber’s Stillmeadow Sampler from 1950. Seventy-three years ago in Connecticut, children went back to school after Labor Day and got out at the end of June. Although we return in August in the deep South and get out at the end of May these days, the prevailing school traditions and the perceptions haven’t changed by more than a month in timeline or in thinking in three quarters of a century.
As I begin this day, I’m sharing some of Taber’s timeless insights and sentiments that she describes from her own lifetime of school beginnings. As I read her words, I think of my Great Granny Haynes, who was surely close in age as I do the math of the years and their family structures of that time.
Gladys
School begins and the children waiting for the school bus look like migratory birds themselves in their bright jackets and with that traveling look. They are traveling too on some sort of education, and this is a journey too, a migration from childhood to a larger world. I always feel a nicking ache that I am no longer filling a pencil case and getting schoolbooks for my child.
Kim
I know well this feeling of the nicking ache, from both a parent and teacher perspective. Even though I love what I do as a District Literacy Specialist, I miss being in the classroom – – especially on the first day of school. The bumper crop of a whole new harvest of students comes hesitantly creeping into the classroom, checking out the seating arrangements and all their friends in the class. They still have high hopes that some teacher hasn’t had conversations with the previous teachers enough to know that there are those who shouldn’t be sitting next to their best friends who get them in trouble the same way they get in trouble for laughing in church – hence, they take their assigned seats.
Gladys
Now, as I see a new bevy of school children waiting for the school bus, I wonder what changes the world will bring to them. But I hope for them that they may have a backlog of family love. A child that is confident that he or she is cherished is armed against almost anything life can bring.
Kim
I’ve taught all grades except 4th and 12th throughout my years teaching, and some of the deepest discussions I had with my high school students as we discussed “ancient literature,” are the ways it applies to students today. Whether we were reading Shakespeare or Steinbeck, the universal themes of literature rose to the top like cream rising on a fresh pitcher of milk, standing the test of time and transcending years and geography. I experience the same longings for children today that Taber did in her day – – the hope that there is a backlog of love, and the wonderings about what life will bring – – the universal, lingering hope through the years that children have a strong sense of belonging.
Gladys
Nowadays few mothers have time to read to the children and if they did, someone would have to turn off the television. But there is a special pleasure in being read to or in reading aloud. Long after I could read everything except such words as peripatetic, I pretended I had to be read to every night.
Kim
Still, there is pleasure in 2023 in reading books and living lives vicariously that we could otherwise not live ourselves. Take Taber, for example. I’m basically a fly on her walls, listening to her conversations as I read her words and take in the similarities of our lives and perspectives. In Taber’s day, the television was an enemy of academia; today, it’s technology, cell phones, and social media. And, of course, Netflix. And don’t get me started on AI, because I might warn that we should all be concerned that our grandchildren don’t grow up and marry robots.
Gladys
Judging by what I read and what I hear, the excitement has chiefly gone from education, and this is a pity. My opinion is that we have too many tired teachers. No matter how gifted a man or woman may be, teaching three times as many pupils as is normal and always trying to do extra jobs to supplement the small salary, drains the enthusiasm.
Kim
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Teachers are still tired. Educators are still trying to supplement the small salary. Enthusiasm still wanes in a steady stream from the beginning of the year to the end, and today, unlike in the 1950s, there are even memes with owls that look like wise professors sitting on branches showing a first day teacher and then a last day teacher owl looking like it’s been in a fight with a pack of hungry coyotes and barely made it out alive. That’s how the year goes most often in the grand scheme of a school year.
I read through her calendar year and imagine the timelines of our perceptions, Gladys’s and mine, like those striated layers of earth from different eras, stacked in the mesas of Arizona – – parallel experiences, one then, one now, but the same kind of living with the same concerns and excitement, just new layers of soil to live it all on. And the one piece most interesting? My own parents would have been those young school children in the bright jackets in 1950, migrating on their journey as Taber noted.
And I’m here right now in 2023, on my front porch, looking out over this farm as Gladys did her own in 1950. Me – an egg from the nest of two of those migratory birds who has raised her own fledglings, who are now raising their own fledglings.
And the beat goes on.
Common Threads 