My Kindergarten Class

Kindergarten (garden of children) was the garden where I bloomed.

I went down around Colonial Circle and two blocks east, past the school patrol at the corner and there was West Elementary School. The classroom was light and airy with large windows along two sides. A long child-sized table was lined up by the windows and little chairs where we could sit. There were no desks. (Desks were in the 1st grade.)

Miss Nelson led us in art and theatre. (Seems like I was always a star.) My self portrait hung on the wall and I sang “Where is pinkie…..” in a performance for the parents. Miss Nelson took us to the post office, a creamery, a train ride and the Bell Telephone Company. The phone company had an exhibit of the evolution of the telephone, right up to the phone where you could see the person you were talking to.

I didn’t get to go on the train. The day before, I slipped going up the brick stairs to my front door and cut open my lip. The teacher and my mom thought I would bleed on the train. No train ride, no Hollywood career, and I wouldn’t eat butter for fifteen years because we had shaken a pint of cream until it turned. I was sure it would taste sour.

experience base

creates spirit of learning

growth of the person

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Back to school in my memory with a dVerse prompt on school.

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Ninth Grade English Class

It was the ninth grade, in Sophie Pouch’s English class, we passed the reading of Macbeth from reader to reader until it went all around the classroom yet still was not done. The next day we did it again and again, when finally, it was finished.

And Shakespeare’s words went out into those hallways of the school with a morning greeting of “How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags?” as we congregated around our lockers. A commanding response of “Speak. Demand. We’ll listen.” “Had I three ears, I’d hear thee.” And on it went into our school day.

Autumn moonlight—
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut. Basho

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dVerse prompt to consider Shakespeare and Basho in a haibun. I will never forget Sophie Pouch’s ninth grade English class.