By Ken Lass
Did you feel that strong blast of wind sweeping through Trussville last week? It was the collective sigh of relief from moms all over town as they sent their children back to school. There is something reassuring and nostalgic about the rumble of the yellow buses winding their way through our neighborhoods again. Everything will be all right. The cycle of life is undisturbed.
Ken Lass, Tribune columnist
The beginning of a new school year always brings back vivid memories for me because my education experience was in such contrast with what our kids are having today. I grew up in the country. I spent eight years attending a little two-room Catholic elementary school. My oldest grandchild is starting first grade this year. She already has three years of school under her belt. She can read, write, add, subtract and multiply. I did not set foot in a school building until my first day of first grade. Only then was I introduced to the incredible world of words, reading, and writing.
My granddaughter is attending Payne Elementary. There are over one thousand students there. She will be in a classroom of over twenty kids, and there will be hundreds more in her grade. I had a grand total of exactly eight kids in my entire grade. Three boys and five girls. I’m pretty sure I was the only one who did not live on a farm.
One room of my little schoolhouse contained all the kids in grades one through four. We called it “the little room.” When you graduated the fourth grade, you advanced into “the Big Room,” the fifth through eighth graders. It was considered quite a rite of passage. The entire school staff consisted of two nuns who lived in the back of the building. They served as teachers of the rooms. The seating in the Big Room was not grouped by grade. Instead, it was arranged by how well-behaved you were. The most misbehaved kids were seated in the very front desks near the teacher, and so on to the rear, where you got to the teacher’s pet suck-ups in the very back. As you might have guessed, I was a front-row kid.
This was the 1960s. There were few rules or school policies as to what teachers could do to you. Discipline was swift and painful. The nun would write an assignment on the board and then stand in the back of the room armed with a wooden yardstick. If she caught you goofing off (which was often for me), she would come up from behind and either smack you on the back with that ruler or grab your ear and twist it about two or three revolutions. A teacher would get arrested for that today, but at St. Mathias Elementary, the nuns were the law, and that was that.
Being a small, independent country school lent itself to some bizarre incidents. There was no air conditioning, so when the weather was hot, two large windows would be cranked wide open with no screens. One day, one of my equally misbehaved classmates saw the nun approaching fast, yardstick in hand. Rather than take his corporal punishment, he bolted out of his desk, and the nun actually chased him around the room. Whereupon he nimbly climbed up to the open window and jumped out. Thank goodness we were on the ground floor. I never knew what the consequences of his escape were, but he was back in class the next day as though nothing had happened.
Behind the teacher’s desk was a small coat room where we would hang up our jackets and store our lunch boxes. The sisters would allow us to pick a partner and go into the coat room, closing the door, to study spelling or math together. She should have known better. It was, in reality, the ideal opportunity to get into mischief. I recall one time when my friend and I got into some of the other kids’ lunch boxes and replaced their sandwich meat with Play-Doh. Another time we somehow got hold of a scissors and proceeded to play barber, cutting each other’s hair. Don’t even ask what sorts of things we put into the pockets of the some of the jackets. Of course, such antics led to multiple ear twisting and yardstick encounters, but, incredulously, the nuns would continue to allow us our small room sessions. Perhaps they were just glad to be rid of us for a few minutes.
Despite all of my misconduct, I don’t recall the nuns ever calling my parents. This was their domain, and they preferred to solve their own problems in their own way. No parental involvement needed. Somehow, I managed to get an education. I was ready for the transition to public high school in grade nine.
Like so many of its kind, St. Mathias closed for good in the 1990s, no longer able to sustain itself. The mass disappearance of the country schoolhouse marked the end of an era in American culture.
Today Trussville kids will get an outstanding education with top-notch teachers and state-of-the-art facilities. My grandkids will emerge smarter than me and, hopefully, better prepared to take on the world. But I bet they’ll never see a classmate jump out the window or get to horse around in a coat room. Now those are memories! My elementary school experience was unique. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
And those two nuns? Surely they’re in heaven by now. They deserve it.
(Ken Lass is a retired Birmingham television news and sports anchor and Trussville resident.)
