'Where They Grind the Grain of Thought'

Let me sing the praises of Miss Milly, Miss McClain, Miss Esson, Miss Shaker, Miss Martin, Miss Rose, Miss Whistler – my teachers, K-6, at Pearl Road Elementary School. Most were young and pretty, more like big sisters than mothers. On the television in Miss Shaker’s class we watched JFK’s inauguration and Señor Benito Lueras taught us Spanish. We were the post-Sputnik generation, drilled in long division using LPs. 

Each year I dreaded the waning of summer and return to school. I loved the freedom and promise of summer vacation, playing Army, reading, collecting butterflies, wasting time. Once classes resumed, I was fine. Without exception I liked my teachers. On Miss Shaker in the third grade I had a poorly concealed crush.

All of my sons liked school, fortunately. It was never trauma for them but always different from what I remembered: kids wearing jeans or shorts, no blackboards or chalk, lots of AV gear, few books, little homework, more male teachers and noise. Education seems uniquely prone to waves of changes in fashion. Remember “base five” in math?  Howard Nemerov writes in “September, the First Day Of School” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“A school is where they grind the grain of thought,

And grind the children who must mind the thought.

It may be those two grindings are but one . . .”

 

Nemerov seems at first to be reviving that tired cliché about school being onerous drudgery, “back to the salt mine.” He brings to mind Dickens’ Gradgrind. But consider the subsequent lines:

 

“. . . As from the alphabet come Shakespeare’s Plays,

As from the integers comes Euler’s Law,

As from the whole, inseparably, the lives,

 

"The shrunken lives that have not been set free

By law or by poetic phantasy.”