It’s September and time for kids to return to school. It’s the beginning of a new year. In fact, for most of my life, the true year began on September 1, not January 1. My calendar-year finally reverted when I retired and no longer associated my life with academics.
On the other hand, the years of COVID-19 differed from those of the past. Even after the spread of this coronavirus became less serious, the question of a classroom versus electronic alternates continued as an ongoing academic concern. When September arrives, it has become difficult to define what is meant by “going back to school.”
The quandary comes, in part, from whether school is a place or an event. Like a circus. Must a circus occur in a tent or can the spectacle be encountered in any place where clowns, aerial-acrobats and elephants abound? Yet, a modern circus no longer can exhibit elephants on parade. Perhaps, desks and blackboards, or even whiteboards, are no longer required for “going back to school.” In fact, the three-ring circus tent of the past seldom can be found today. The circus tent which was a significant location for socialization has become obsolete. There are those who, believing a physical classroom is required for socialization, expect that real schools will not go the way of the circus tent.
Do you remember when desks were the essential symbols for a real schoolroom? When I was in school, the placement of student desks would not accommodate today’s requirement for social distancing. In both elementary and high school, desks for pupils were anchored to the floor in long rows separated by very narrow aisles. The seat in front of you was part of your own desk. Your own seat was only inches away from your desktop. Thank goodness that, back then, few students were “overweight.” Heaven help the ones who might be pudgy! Slipping into their seats could require some wriggling before any comfort could be obtained for the next hour.
The school desk back then had a unique shape, especially in the elementary years. The desktop was tilted and had a hole in the corner. The tilt might have been only a few degrees, perhaps ten or fifteen. It was, nevertheless, one that would make it easy for anything other than a heavy, immobile book to slide onto the floor.
I’m not sure why the top of each student’s own desk required being tilted. Perhaps, it was to keep the book you were reading at an appropriate angle, so you would not slouch until the teacher called on you for a response you really did not want to make. The incline, however, did make taking a nap, with your head on your desk, a bit more comfortable.
The desktop was hinged to allow for storage of your school supplies. All of the books you had to read were kept there, when they were not in use. In fact, this was a storage place for just about everything. There was no need for backpacks for lugging or storing items you might need during the day. There was even an adjoining, walk-in storage room for hanging wet coats and for drying boots that were worn on bad-weather days which, in Ohio, occurred almost daily from November through April. Individual lockers were not available until you entered junior high school.
An interesting feature of the student desks for the elementary years was the hole in the extremely narrow flat board on the upper edge of the lid. Most of the time it was merely a hole, an easy place to drop a hard, red rubber eraser or a hastily discarded wad of paper which could have been a secret note from the student across the aisle or the remains of a missile not yet tossed, because the teacher continued looking directly at you for the entire lesson.
Of course, the real purpose of the hole in your desktop was to serve as a repository for a small bottle of black ink. Although first graders possessed lead pencils a half-inch in diameter and, later, a yellow, number two pencil, there came a time, usually in the second grade, when pupils had to learn the mystery of ink and pens. The bottle of ink was quite small. It had a narrow top with a cork stopper. The size of the bottle and its opening were limited in order to avoid too great a mishap when the bottle was not in its hole. Of course, that rarely happened. Girls with pigtails had them dipped in inkwells only in Little Rascals movies seen on Saturday mornings and not during the real life encountered from eight to three, Monday through Friday.
On the other hand, students in classrooms several decades ago did need to be careful not to leak ink onto everything around them. Now, when students return to school, they seldom worry about leaky pens. Instead, their pockets bulge with electronic substitutes. Smart-phones don’t leak, but they do require the use of two opposable thumbs rather than one thumb and two, ink-stained fingers.