History Lesson (03-30-09)

You never know when a bit of history is going to walk through your door. I was passing by the office one day this week, when I saw an unfamiliar person walking towards me. The man carried himself well, tall and sprightly, dressed impeccably in a nice suit. His hair was grey and his face wrinkled, but his eyes shone with the clarity of someone obviously young at heart.

He came to me and introduced himself as a Mr. Lake. I think his first name was Leo, but my memory for names has never been that good, so I will go with what I know. Mr. Lake had worked as a middle school teacher for Hill City for two years in the early 1950’s. In fact, his second year was the year they began construction on the north wing.

Mr. Lake had approached me because he heard that I was the principal. He also had been an elementary principal, and an assistant superintendent, and a superintendent. All in all, his career in education had spanned more than forty years.

He happened to be passing through Hill City and so he wanted to walk through the school of his very first teaching job. He told me that during his two-year stay, he taught a class of twenty-six sixth grade students, and a class of forty-three eighth grade students.

Yes, I repeat, forty-three eighth grade students. According to Mr. Lake, when he first began teaching, the building housed grades 1-8. There was neither pre-school nor kindergarten, nor was there music or art. The school had two or three sections of each grade, with each section having more than twenty-five students. His first year teaching sixth grade, he taught one of three sections, all in rooms that have been since combined to form our grade school library. Mr. Lake didn’t even remember our school even having a library back then.

After Mr. Lake earned enough college credit to get a teaching license, he heard that there was a job opening in Hill City. He was interviewed at the gas station across from Cameron’s. The one thing he remember being asked was did he expect to be drafted. He thought it unlikely, so he was hired on the spot.

Of course, as is often the case, after one year of teaching Mr. Lake was drafted. The school board requested and received a series of short deferments. “They kept applying again and again, stringing me along month after month in order to get to the end of the year,” Mr. Lake told me. “Eventually, the draft board just gave in and told Hill City that I could report as soon as the school year was over. I graduated my forty-three eighth grade students on a Friday evening, and reported for duty on Saturday morning.”

Now I want to get back to the forty-three eighth graders. Apparently, this was smallest class in the school, and there just weren’t enough rooms for them to be separated into two sections. I would imagine that this class of forty-three had probably been together all throughout school. The plight of this class, crammed into a single room year after year, probably helped gain public support for building the north wing.

“I had to put every two rows of desks right next to each other in order to get them all in,” Mr. Lake told me. “And I had a student in a wheel chair who I sat in the doorway so he could hear me teach.”

Just imagine it, over forty students having to negotiate razor thin rows between desks that had been pushed together. If these desks were like the ones used today with an opening only on one side, that means that students would have had to literally climb into the desks whose opening where blocked by a second desk positioned along side.

“For all the teaching I was able to do that year, I should have given the district back every cent they paid me,” Mr. Lake confessed. That year, he succeeded only in keeping order, and we shared a laugh at the thought that perhaps teaching forty-three eighth graders, alone, in a small room, with no music, art, special ed, or even recess, was probably the best preparation he could have had for the US Military.

I don’t know if Mr. Lake will ever have a chance to read this. He lives back in the eastern part of the state, and he was only passing through town. All the same, I just want to thank him for the history lesson. I had no idea of the just how far our education system has come in the last sixty years and for me, his stories put our current struggles into the proper principal’s perspective.