The Old School Adventure (Part Two)

October 2012

By Pat McManus

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Last month, I wrote about hiking to the site of the old log school that I, more or less, attended when I was six and seven. I was accompanied by two of my daughters, Shan and Kelly, and one of my grandsons, Jake. It was a great adventure. Now that I am almost 80, any adventure is great, but this one was particularly so. We had a really great time climbing over fallen logs, following the remnants of a trail that wound along the lower side of a mountain, wading down a creek, and all the usual stuff of which great adventures are made. Two of my fingers are still numb from nettle stings, or at least I assume that is why they are numb. An adventure isn’t an adventure unless you return with a few injuries.

 

When we, at last, found the site of the old school, which I was able to identify from an S bend of the creek and a couple of poles from an old logging bridge that had once crossed the creek, and because it was the only flat, dry, clear spot in the entire forest. As I surveyed the site, I suddenly recalled in the sharpest recollection I’ve ever experienced what my life had been like back then. For that reason, I advise against going back in time to a place you once frequented as a little kid. Memory is a stern editor, erasing all the bad stuff and leaving only the good, at least in my case. For seventy-some years, I had remembered my years of living in that great and remote forest, far from any form of civilization, as the very summit of ecstasy, the fantasy of any young boy. As I studied this long-lost place, memories came flooding back. And alas, they were not pleasant. As a six and seven-year-old, I was bored stiff most of the time, the boredom occasionally relieved by a dose of sheer terror. (I will discuss wolves later.)

 

We had no television, no radio, no movies, no magazines, no newspapers. It was life on the spare and ugly side. One day, when I was six, or maybe seven, I became so bored I taught myself to read. Since I lived at a school, there were plenty of books available to me, although the educational authorities of the day had detected and removed anything of the slightest interest to a young boy. I took a third-grade reader off a shelf, hauled it over to my bed, and told myself I would not leave that bed until I could read a story in that book perfectly from beginning to end. Having spent most of my life in schools, I was familiar with phonics and knew how to sound out words. By the end of that day, I could read the story perfectly. And from then on, I knew how to read. That story was the most boring thing I have ever read in my life. It was about peanuts. The only interesting thing I learned from it was that peanuts grow underground, like potatoes, not on top of the ground like decent and self-respecting nuts. 

 

Fortunately for the furtherance of my education, two cowboys lived on a vast cattle ranch a few miles from the school. Both of them were addicted to comic books and had accumulated about a thousand of them, or at least an endless source for me. It was through those comic books that I honed my education. But to return to the day I learned to read, I said to my mother at supper that evening, “I learned to read today, Mom.”

 

She said, “That’s nice. Now eat your gruel.”

 

It is my understanding, which may be wrong, that phonics is no longer taught in first grade at our nation’s schools. I am not a serious critic of our educational systems, but I do think the omission of phonics from the first-grade curriculum, if indeed that is the case, would be criminal.