School nostalgia

[cactuswatcher]

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1. We had the carts but they held (film) movie projectors and no substitute teacher in my day ever showed a movie in class. Our high school did have a few TVs and we got to watch a rocket launch or two, and the World Series when our home team is involved. In those days the World Series games were played in the afternoon instead of at night

2. We had card catalogues, but I quickly learned it was better to learn the layout of the library and go directly to the section of interest. What was the point of looking up a specific book only to find out it was already checked out? Yes, in looking at grad schools I only applied to places with open stacks. Only Ohio State used the Dewey Decimal system of the schools I attended.

3. The cards in our library books just had return due dates not signatures. We did see names in a list if we got used text books at the start of the school year. You signed them to have a hope of getting them back if they were lost.

4. As I started school the classic black blackboards were being replaced with green chalkboards (which still exist some places). I had a high school teacher who was seriously allergic to chalk dust who would have been very pleased if she could have had a white board instead!

5. Being dysgraphic, my teachers had no interest in having me learn cursive at the chalk board. (I did do the occasional math problem for the class at the board.)

6. My mother was friends with the lady who ran the school lunch program for our whole school district, so I bought my lunches. When I needed to bring a lunch it was always in a paper bag.

8. I never had a problem with the rugged, school pencil sharpeners. Maybe that was because I had experience with our home pencil sharpeners which did sometimes have those problems.

9. Overhead projectors were a new thing when I was in school. They seemed to come in as the somewhat unrelated film strip projectors were being retired.

10. I used the ditto machine to print tests for my Russian classes. Our department secretary was very excited a few years later to inform us alumni that the office was switching to Cyrillic word processing.

11. The only time we had table and chairs when I was in school was in high school journalism class.

12. A local aerospace company, in partially justifying the cost of its giant main frame computers to the U.S. government, offered to keep many of our area school districts' records for free. So I had computer printed report cards from high school on. As I recall we didn't have to have our grade cards signed after grade school.