Schools, colleges and libraries were added to Ticky Tacky Town this week.
Schools and Colleges
Grades 1- 8 I went to Catholic School. I actually did walk a mile to school every day rain or shine, sleet or snow. Our school didn't have school buses. Funny thing is that there were two Catholic church and schools a couple of blocks away from each other. When they were originally built one (St. Joseph's) was for the German folks and the other (St. Mary's) was for the Irish. I went to St. Mary's.
I couldn't wait to go to school. I loved learning. (Still do).
The classes were small so one teacher, usually a nun, taught two grades that occupied one classroom. My favorite subjects were Math and English, Composition, Spelling, Reading...well maybe I should just list my least favorite classes - history and geography. History seemed like it was all about studying wars and memorizing dates and I have to admit I am still geographically challenged. I really loved diagramming sentences but not many others did. I think those exercises helped me learn a few new languages later in life. I don't think they teach that anymore. I got a puzzled look when I asked my grandkids about that.
I couldn't wait to learn cursive writing. We used fountain pens with cartridges that sometimes leaked all over the place. We had to use blue ink, not black. Not sure why. I remember practicing loops and curves on lined paper. (Kind of a bit like practicing for FMQ, don't you think?) I'm not sure that they teach cursive writing anymore either. Now they learn keyboarding at an early age. I wonder if future generations will be able to decipher any cursive writing. And speaking of writing...I also loved to write stories that made the class laugh when I read them out loud. I loved writing research papers too. That was before you could quickly research any subject at a computer. Research involved libraries and card catalogs and writing things out in cursive.
They didn't have keyboarding back when I was in school...they called it typewriting and I didn't have a class in that until high school. It was recommended if we were going to go to college that we take a typing class. So I did. We learned to type on manual typewriters and for one week we all got to use the newfangled electric typewriter. When I went to college I bought a manual typewriter from the Pawn Shop and the hard case had someone else's initials painted on it. It is still up in the attic somewhere and I still wonder about the story behind that pawned typewriter. When I took my first computer science courses in college I keypunched my programs on to cards that a teacher's assistant would insert into the computer mainframe. Hardly anyone had a computer at home.
It took me forever to get through college. I couldn't decide what I wanted to be when I grew up so changed my major many times- education, Spanish, psychology, computer science. I did have a couple of scholarships and tested out of a few classes but otherwise I paid as I went because I didn't want to go into debt. Sometimes that meant I would not take classes for a couple of years, took correspondence courses (remember there were no online classes) or night classes so I could continue to work at a paying job - usually at minimum wage which was an incentive for me to carry on and some day finish college. In those days except for cars and houses we saved up for things before we bought them. We didn't have credit cards; we had bank savings passbooks and visited the bank each week to make a deposit.
Libraries
If I wanted to go to the library I took a bus downtown. If I remember right it cost a dime to ride the bus and the buses were always full of people. I was always afraid I would not pull the cord at the right time so I could get off in the right spot. Later the library bookmobile stopped on Saturdays about a block away. I read every Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew book they had and wondered when I would be lucky enough to have a mystery to solve in my neighborhood. Now I'm glad I was never that "lucky". I still love mysteries but read them on an old version Kindle now.
