by Merlin Lessler
She walked to the blackboard. It was
the biggest one I’d ever seen, stretching across the entire front
wall of the room. She reached into the tray, picked up a piece of
white chalk (no yellow in those days) and wrote Mrs. Shopper across
the top. It was just squiggles to us; we couldn’t read. It was our
first day in school, kindergarten at Longfellow Elementary on
Binghamton’s south side.
I walked there with my friend Woody,
under the supervision of his older brother Stu and my older sister
Madeline. We took the “long” way, up to the top of my street,
Chadwick, along Moore to Pennsylvania, and down to the school that
sat on a plot of land now occupied by a UHS sleep disorder and
neuro-diagnostic facility. The short way, which we took every day
after that 1st one, was on a path that started in my back
yard, meandered through a wood lot, past an abandoned metal hulk of
an old farm truck, skirted around a small frog pond and up a hill
through an overgrown hay field coming out where Brookfield and
Aldridge meet.
I still remember that first day, the
bully that pushed me aside at the sandbox and yanked a fire truck out
of my hands, but the thing that dominates my memory, is the “magic
slate where Mrs. Shopper wrote her name and then turned to us, like
every teacher in every grade after that, and said, “I’m your
teacher, Mrs. Shopper.” And, added, “That’s my name,” knowing
we were illiterate and would be for at least another year and a half.
That’s why we were there. Her job was to get us started: the ABC’s,
counting, telling time, tying our shoes and enough socialization
skills to prepare us for real schooling. Little by little, that long
piece of slate, and others like it, converted the mush in our skulls
to knowledge. It was a low-tech device yet it was all that was
needed. It was a magic slate! The primary tool in a teacher’s
arsenal.
But, it wasn’t just academics that
came from that inert piece of slate; it had the power to hoodwink an
entire classroom, an entire school. It had us chomping at the bit to
do chores of the sort we took great pains to skip out of at home. It
started when Mrs. Shopper turned from the board one day, after weeks
of us gaping at her as she slowly and deliberately moved the eraser
back and forth on the slate, mysteriously removing all her carefully
drawn symbols (kids were pretty naïve back then) and asked Delbert
Geragosian (the tallest kid in class) to come to the front of the
room to clean the board. We were stunned, but not Delbert. He never
had a problem grabbing the brass ring. Flying to the task, he aped
her methodology, carefully and slowly removing all traces of the
morning’s lesson. He proudly strutted back to his desk, indifferent
to the 18 jealous, yet secretly thrilled classmates who surrounded
him. Jealous, because he was the one who had been selected, but
thrilled because we had been in school long enough to know the ropes.
Our turn would come soon enough, probably in alphabetical order.
The trap had been set and sprung. For
the rest of my confinement at PS-13 (as we referred to Longfellow), I
never saw a teacher erase a blackboard at the end of a lesson; it was
always a kid. And, as we had speculated, the tradition of picking a
student at random was short lived. After a month of it, an
alphabetical assignment list was posted off to the side of the
blackboard, putting us on equal footing with the teacher’s pets. We
could recognize our names by then. The list was one of many.
Everything was controlled by a list: leading the pledge to the flag,
starting the morning prayer, cleaning erasers and washing the board,
both of which were performed after the school day ended. And even
though I spent all day waiting to break free of my confinement in
that brick prison, when it was my turn to do either of those two
chores, I eagerly stayed behind as the rest of the class rushed to
freedom. Now I understand how easy it was for Tom Sawyer to get his
friends to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence.
Erasers were cleaned on a special device in the school basement. It was a strange contraption bolted to a bench with a crank attached to a rotating brush. When you turned the crank the brush swept across the eraser, agitating the chalk dust and blowing it into a hooded bin. Washing the board also entailed a trip into Mr. Vanick’s (the kindly school janitor) subterranean headquarters. We filled a dented galvanized pail with water and grabbed a sponge from the bin. It was my favorite chore. Like magic, it restored the board to a pristine, black luster. Tom Sawyer’s con job had nothing over the scam pulled off by the all-female staff at PS-13. I loved being called to the blackboard, except when it was to write, fifty times, “I will not throw paper airplanes in class ever again,” while the rest of the kids rushed out to the playground for recess. I learned so much from that simple piece of slate. But as important as the academic lessons were, those blackboards taught me even more about human nature. That was the real magic!
PS - 13 circa 1954
