Now & Then: Going to school, years ago

— I haven’t been in a school classroom for many years now, but given the changes in the methods of teaching over the years, I doubt that I would recognize many of the learning procedures.

I’ve had some exposure to computer-based learning programs, but those were commonly for learning about computers, or computer software, or operating systems. I understand that today’s school students may sometimes use interactive computer learning packages to delve into history, scientific information or to practice mathematical calculations and procedures, and so on. Apparently hand calculators are pretty common equipment for today’s students, as common as pens and pencils, spiral notebooks and binders.

I have often imagined how it might have been to go to a one-room school as my parents did in the 1920s. My mother attended school at Valley View, a rural school on what today is the Price Coffee Road running westward off Arkansas Hwy. 72 along the Little Sugar Creek valley northeast of Bentonville. My dad started school at the old Liberty School, located a mile or so southeast of the Pea Ridge National Military Park. About 1922, I think Liberty School was consolidated with Garfield, and Dad did all his later grades at Garfield.

My mother loved her Valley View School, and sometimes she would talk about school daysthere. Valley View was a one-room, one-teacher school, offering a firstgrade through eighthgrade education. Often we hear about the emphasis in early schools as being on “readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithmetic,” and there certainly were many exercises in those areas; but the students also learned quite a bit about history, music, good literature, composition, penmanship and civics (local, state and national government).

In hearing my mother’s descriptions, it was amazing to me that one teacher found time to deal with so many areas of learning, and that they often seemed to do quite well in that effort.

When I started to first grade in 1946 at Pea Ridge, it was common for us to have a yellow pencil and a Big Chief writing tablet, with its wide-lined brownish paper. In first grade, we sat around tables in three groups, the Redbirds, Bluebirds and Blackbirds. Each of us had our assigned place. We even had a mechanical pencil sharpener on the wall, a new thing to me at the time. The teacher had to show us how to sharpen our pencil properly with it, so as not to break the lead, or to grind up too much pencil. We had a blackboard reaching all across the front of the room, a picture of President George Washington hanging above it, and a coal stove in the corner by the door to warm by. It was pretty nice to come in from recess on a cold day, and just stand by the stove to soak up the warmth.

My mother said that when she first started school, each of the students had a slate to write on. I have never seen one just as she described, but apparently it was like having a small individual blackboard to write on.

Paper was scarce then.

The slate gave each student space to write spelling words, to jot the answer to a question, or to work out an arithmetic problem. Then the slate could be erased to go on to something else (kind of like clearing the computer screen I guess).

In Mother’s classes, recitin’ time was a big time at school. For each assignment there was a teacher’s presentation time, a study and written exercises time, and a recitation time. Recitation time meant that you were called to stand up and answer questions on the content of the lesson. Sometimes the teacher was asking for facts discovered, results of calculations, important bits of information that should be remembered; or a student might be challenged to recite a poem from memory, to summarize a story recently read, or just to read aloud for all to hear. Many teachers in the early schools also used competition to motivate their students and to make things moreinteresting. Mother was pretty good at math, and she loved to tell about the “ciphering matches.” In a ciphering match, you would be matched against another student, or maybe several. The contestants would line up at the blackboard, all equipped with white chalk and an eraser, and the teacher would call out an arithmetic problem to be “worked.” It might be addin’, subtractin’, multiplyin’ or dividin’. The object was to see who could work out the answer first.

The ciphering matches were also done as competitions between schools.

Most of the rural schools of those days didn’t have sports competitions between schools, but they did have competitive ciphering matches and spelling bees. Mother told about going to other schools in the county, such as Summit (near old Bella Vista), New Home (north of Bentonville) or Central (at old Leetown on the Pea Ridge Battlefield). She apparently often won her ciphering matches, and from all indications it was about as much fun to win a cipherin’ match in the 1920s as it was for us when we won a basketball game in the ’40s or ’50s.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 10/24/2012