347 Days until the Big 50

Was second grade second rate? Probably. I know it sounds like I have a chip on my shoulder about my grammar school, but actually school was not all that bad. The problems were mostly with the teachers at the school.

Jimmy Crack Corn and I don’t care. After surviving Mrs. Master’s First Class Fright Fest for first grade I must have been suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. I don’t remember a great deal about what I learned in second grade. My second grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Kornacker, hence the reminiscence of a popular childhood song. Physically, she was the opposite of Mrs. Masters. Mrs. Kornacker could only be described as “tight”. She was little and had tiny eyes hiding behind her small pointy eyeglasses. Her blond hair was a firmly compacted covering with a perfectly rounded design on either side of her forehead. Her milky white skin made her look a bit like one of the mannequin’s in the windows of Seymour Paisen’s fine dress shop. She was short, very short and was always dressed in a suit like outfit, blazer on top, a-line skirt, 2 inch heel pumps. She could have probably hid under Mrs. Master’s moomoo type dress and no one would have ever found her.

It was with Mrs. Kornacker that I first noticed the idea of a teacher having “Pets” in the classroom. Mrs. Kornacker reserved her tight little red lipped grins for the kids she thought were her smartest students. Never mind that she probably had nothing to do with how smart the kids were. The teachers at DeWitt Clinton Grammar School had hit the proverbial educational jackpot. In the 1960’s and 70’s they got to work in the City of Chicago at a Public School filled with middle and upper middle class kids whose parents provided a safe clean neighborhood and a deep abiding respect and no interference policy for teachers, even the ones who placed kids in garbage cans. Oh, I know the pendulum has swung the other way. Now, out here in Suburbia, parents who were once silent victims of an oppressive educational regime now demand a say in how their children are educated. But back in my day, the only time we saw parents in a school was when they showed up to watch us sing once a year. And even then it was mostly the stay at home moms. A dad was never seen in school.

I cannot be sure if Mrs. Kornacker actually taught me anything. I continued to learn, but much of what I was learning came from my home. I saw my parents reading newspapers religiously and listened to my brothers who were five and 7 years older than I am. I too started reading the newspaper, first the comics, but as time progressed I would search out other parts of the paper for providing an opportunity to learn new words and see if I could figure out what was going on in the world around me. I also learned a lot in the alley where I spent a great deal of my spare time playing with children of all ages. Perhaps those are the real opportunities missing from my kids lives. No more newspapers. No playing with a dozen kids of all ages. Why bother when we have 120 channels worth of television to watch? They sit in class rooms with round tables or long tables and facing each other. No staring at the back of some other kid’s head with a teacher like Mrs. Kornacker showing her thin smile when and if she felt pleased by one of her students.