I was six years old when I walked into Sister Doyle’s first grade classroom. It was my first year at St. Peter’s School. The school, a big brick building with lots of windows, was on the corner of a busy street, two houses down from where my family lived.
Kindergarten was a long six blocks away. I walked with my best friend, Betty Ann Lennon, holding hands all the way. I was short and extremely shy. Betty Ann was tall and brave. Walking to school made me feel a little braver, too.
While kindergarten was mostly devoted to listening to the teacher read stories to us, taking a nap, and going outside to play, first grade was serious business.
Sister Doyle had sixty-four students in her classroom, sitting eight students to a table. Sister was small and pretty. She smiled all the time but, to us, she seemed very old. Looking back, I think she had recently graduated from the Franciscan convent. She had probably just turned twenty-one.
The first day of class, Sister Doyle asked us to stand up by our desk and say our name. “My name is Mary Lynda Jones,” I whispered.
The boy sitting next to me, jumped up with a swagger and announced, “My name is Dennis, zip up your barn door, Kelly.” The class laughed. Sister Doyle did not. We weren’t in kindergarten any more.
None of us learned to read in kindergarten. Nobody did. None of us learned to read at home. Nobody did. We didn’t have books at home and we didn’t go to a library. We were little kids. We played outside. My Dad read comic books to us, but it never occurred to me that I could learn to read, too, until I got to first grade.
The second day of school, Sister Doyle told us we were going to learn to read. She promised that all sixty-four of us would be reading by the end of the year. I still remember the magic of it.
Every day Sister Doyle read us a story about another letter and the sound it made. It was the Sesame Street approach before Sesame Street. I still remember the letter M. A monkey told us that the letter M said, “Mmmmm. The sound you make when something taste really good. Mmmmm, milk. Mmmm, macaroni.”
At the end of the story, we sat at our table for thirty minutes with a plain piece of paper in front of us and a big bucket of crayons to share. We practiced drawing the letter M. We drew pictures of all the words we could think of that started with Mmm.
It worked. All sixty-four of us learned to read, except maybe Charles Gott. For months I thought his name was Child of God. Charles often came to school with no lunch. When I told my mother, she started packing an extra sandwich in my lunch bag to give to Charles. Because Charles couldn’t remember all the letters of the alphabet, he got to stay in first grade another year and listen to Sister Doyle’s stories all over again.
My only other memory of first grade is that when a child broke a rule, Sister Doyle would take her paper punch and punch a hole in the paper he or she was working on. Parents and Sister Evangelista, the Principal, could look at the child’s paper and know they did something bad.
I got in trouble only once the entire time I was in school and it was in Sister Doyle’s class. We were coloring pictures of snow. I was using a crayon to color each dot of snow. Sister Doyle thought she heard someone knock on the door. When she went to answer the door, no one was there. She turned to us and asked who had been knocking on their desk so loud that it sounded like someone knocking on our door.
Mark Robertson, a boy at my table, raised his hand and said, “Sister, it was Mary Lynda. She’s coloring her snow so loud it sounds like someone is knocking on the door.”
I was mortified. I’m sure I started to cry. Sister Doyle came to me and explained to the class that this time she wouldn’t punch a hole in my paper. Instead, she took out a straight pin, and pricked a tiny hole in the upper corner of my paper. I learned my lesson.
But most of all, I learned to read.
My Sister Doyle was “Miss Margaret” in a one-room country schoolhouse in Kansas. We were taught to use a strip of paper to underline a sentence so we would learn to read smoothly. Eventually, it worked.
I was so thrilled to read Dick and Jane. And how crazy it was that we didn’t learn to read sooner. Your stories bring back so many memories.
It’s hard to imagine a classroom with 64 students and one teacher. In my elementary school in the ’50s, we often had at least 35 but nothing like what you described. In Texas in those days, there wasn’t public kindergarten, so most kids just started school in 1st grade. When I was 3 and 4 a older neighbor girl decided to teach me to read. They were a self-described “hillbilly” family from Arkansas and had no books in the house except for the Bible. I already knew the alphabet, so Judy started by showing me the table of contents and saying things like, which word is Numbers or which one is Deuteronomy? I would guess based on the first letter. Then we moved on to finding words in text. I’m sure it didn’t do much for comprehension, but I got pretty good at word finding. By the time I got to 1st grade, I could read fairly well. We were taught reading with the Dick and Jane books, which I thought were rather boring (especially compared to the Bible).
My Nun, Sister….., taught me to read in Kindergarten. I went to
Public School starting in first grade. My First grade teacher was
so impressed by my reading, I was sent to read in front of the
other first grade class in West Warren, Massachusetts. I
remember feeling a strong sense of accomplishment. Ever
since then, I continue to be an avid daily reader! I still have my
Report Card. I had all A’s but also showing a negative mark for “deportment” and the nun’s comment that I was too talkative in
class!
Well, I don’t remember when I learned to read, but I DO remember that reading was something I loved. The reading memory that stays with me is of sharing the love of library books with my best friend in 4-6th grades. We were allowed to go to the school library and check out books, which seemed like getting away with something. And she and I would read a book and then TALK about all the people in it and the things that happened. To this day when we have lunch once a year, we talk about “The Pink Maple House” and whether it was fair of the girl’s mother to move her in the middle of the school year. But how gorgeous the house was (there were, of course only drawings….no real pictures) and how we would LOVE to live in it! Every now and then when I am driving down a street with older houses and trees, I think I see the pink maple house.
I remember only that I was in a one-room school in West Virginia and the teacher was…my mother! All I remember was being the Little Red Hen at Halloween. She was always reading to me. So it must have worked–I learned to read!
I learned to read from some wonderful teachers at Windsor Elementary School in Des Moines, Iowa. I particularly remember Mrs. Smith. She had us read book during Brotherhood/Sisterhood Book Week that were about kids in other parts of the world. I read a Pearl Buck children’s novel called “The Big Wave” about a boy in China who lost his entire family when a tidal wave wiped out his village. Mrs. Smith also had our class do a project in which we would write to an author when we enjoyed a book of theirs that we had read. If the author responded back, Mrs. Smith encouraged us to share the author’s response with the rest of the class. I still have my “Author Book” that I compiled while I was in her class, comprised of letters I had received from various authors.