Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made The Hit Parade,
Guys like us, we had it made,
Those were the days!
And you knew where you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great,
Those were the days!
The days many people today seem to long for include the Korean Conflict, the VietNam War, the urban riots during the Civil Rights movement, the AIDS scare. One can almost envision a few years down the road that millennials will be looking back with fondness on good old days like September 11, 2001.
Time plays tricks on people. Many human beings seem to remember only the good and forget the bad, while others do just the opposite, emphasizing the bad and ignoring the good. It is my opinion that both groups are unrealistic in their approaches to living. I will leave it to others to help both groups work out their mental health problems.
I, of course, have the answer. For a dose of real nostalgia, the good kind, let us return to the days of yesteryear (that's a phrase from The Lone Ranger radio program if you didn't know) and go back to the school playground, as we did in this post from 2014.
Now that I think about it, grade-school recess wasn't always such fun either. I distinctly remember Sidney Usleton sneaking up on me every day during recess in the second grade and choking me from behind. This lasted until I mentioned it at home, at which time my Dad showed me a little jujitsu move he had learned in the Navy that sent Sidney Usleton packing. He never bothered me again. I think our teacher, Miss Elizabeh Nash (younger sister of Miss Erma, the principal) was oblivious to the whole situation.
Do you have good memories or bad memories from grade school?
I remember both good and bad times from school. I loved school. There were good teachers and bad teachers. There were good and bad things that happened both in class and on the playground. A puzzling thing to me is that I have practically no memory of one school I attended. I remember being outside the school. I think my teacher had dark hair. That's it. I would have been in second grade. Strange.
ReplyDeleteEmma, I loved school too as I was an only child living in the country. Friends and playmates were few during the summer months. I was always glad to see school start up again in the fall. My memories are getting sketchier all the time but I do remember all of my teachers.
DeleteMost of my memories of grade school are good ones. We moved every two or three years so I only have vague memories of my many teachers. I think I only had one teacher I didn't like. She would walk up and down the aisles and hit our hands with a wooden ruler just to keep us in line I guess. I enjoyed most of my schoolwork and the activities we did and I loved recess!
ReplyDeleteBonnie, I was in the same school from 2nd through 12th grades. Moving around a lot does not sound like fun, being the new kid, leaving old friends, having to make new ones over and over. In Texas where I was the teachers didn’t have rulers, they had big paddles. I behaved because I didn’t want “the board of education” to ever be applied to “the seat of learning.”
DeleteMy memories from school are mixed. On a social level only the 'in crowd' had a happy time. I was not one of them. I did and do love learning though.
ReplyDeleteSue, my self-assessment is that I was kind of in the “second tier” socially. Not an athlete at all, which is where the popularity gravitated. I was known as “ the smartest boy in the class” which both helped and hindered relationships with others. I loved and love learning too!
DeleteI have mostly good memories of grade school. we had a rickety cold one room country school house but it was an enjoyable place. we were like one big family.
ReplyDeleteRed, I’m glad you have good memories of your school days. Our school was a little larger than yours, but we were like one big family too.
DeleteMy grade school memories are good! I liked my teachers, and I had some good friends who are still friends now. I don't remember being bullied, but I do remember riding the bus with all grades of kids, and the high school boys would pull up the pom pom on my hat. :)
ReplyDeleteKathy, I rode the bus home in the afternoons but rode in a neighboring teacher’s car to school in the mornings. She ended up being my algebra geometry teacher in high school. I never pulled up anybody’s pom poms.
DeleteIs grade school what we call junior school, catering for five or six to eleven years old children?
ReplyDeleteI had a terrible time, where they got the teachers from god only knows. We had one good one who made me do an intelligence test, I needed specs before I could do it, then when I got them I fell down the school steps, they looked nearer than they previously did. I eventually did the test and was pronounced compos mentis but bone idle. Even at that tender age I can remember thinking 'Bone Idle' was a bit rich coming from a teacher.
Adrian, good to hear from you again. Yes, grade school corresponds to what some call primary school or elementary school, as distinct from junior high or middle school (typically grades 6 through 8) and high school (typically grades 9 through 12, though more commonly referred to as freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior).
DeleteI am familiar with both compos mentis and non compos mentis, but ‘bone idle’ is a new one on me. Does it mean sedentary or thick-skulled or something else altogether?
I was going to start by asking the same question as Adrian but decided that I couldn't add anything until I knew the answer. Google was most unhelpful defining only by elementary, middle and high. I didn't enjoy school. I wanted to do practical things. Heaven knows why given that my family was, and is, steeped in a love of learning and academia and research. I studied because I had to to get anywhere. Like you I had a seminal moment after which I was never bullied.
ReplyDeleteGraham see my reply to Adrian for what grade school means. I think we would have been friends in school, although my retentive memory made studying easier for me. P.S. - I googled ‘grade school definition’ and the answer came up immediately.
DeleteThe answer I got was:
DeleteWhat age is grade school in USA?
Elementary school is kindergarten through 5th grade (ages 5-10), middle school is grades 6-8 (ages 11-13), and high school is grades 9-12 (ages 14-18).
"Do you have good memories or bad memories from grade school?"
ReplyDeletePrior to school, I lived an isolated existence, so I started school by having mumps, measles, chicken pox, and a succession of colds that led to pleurisy, all in the first grade, and things more or less went downhill from there.
I enjoyed "All in the Family" a lot more when it aired than I do now because I fancied at the time that the show provided an intelligent--though humorous--analysis of conservatism versus liberalism. Now, it seems, for the most part, silly and superficial, with the two women primarily being appeasers who seldom took a moral stand, and the two men being insensitive hypocrites....
I just looked up Norman Lear--he is 98.
Snowbrush, thanks for dropping by “ye olde blog” once again. What a terrible first-grade year you must have had, and I’m sorry to hear that “things more or less went downhill from there.” Maybe you should just tell people that you peaked early.
DeleteI remember seeing an interview with Norman Lear years ago in which he stated that the Archie Bunker character was based on his own father, and that he didn’t hate his father, he loved his father although they disagreed about everything.
I never really liked school, except for two things. I was good at acting and enjoyed the drama club and the opportunity to perform in plays. I also played sports for my school and to this day have fond memories of playing but have not been a big fan of watching sports. As for the social life of the school I was an outcast, but made it through, developed a passion for learning that has served me well in life, and continues to this day.
ReplyDeleteDavid, your answer is very interesting but drama club, sports, and social life sound more like high school than grade school (my question in the post)!
ReplyDeleteThanks for coming by my blog; I returned the favor (though I didn’t leave a comment yet) and am blown away, as they say, by the quality of both the prose and the photographs. You are my second Canadian male commenter, the other one being Red who lives in Alberta although he grew up in Esk, Saskatchewan.
As Humphrey Bogart said to Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.