My daughter recently attended a homecoming game - the seniors had been her second grade students 10 years ago, and she was quite surprised that some of them remembered her. Granted 10 years isn’t ridiculously long, but it is more than half of their lifetimes.
And it got me thinking about my second grade, which was school year 1961-62. The teacher was Miss Strohecker (I think that’s how it was spelled - she got married and left at the end of the year.) Being in the thick of the baby-boom years, our school was crazy over-crowded, so first and second grade students were split, with half the kids going in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. I was in the afternoon group.
I have a hazy impression of the classroom - I don’t remember the room number, but I know I could point it out if I was at the school. The only other thing I remember is Carl, who sat behind me. He used to chew on the point of his pencil, so he always had black messes around his mouth. Even at that age, I was grossed out.
Miss Jenanyan. I remember how she looked, I remember her voice. I remember the covers of the spelling workbooks, which were divided into fourths and depicted a rural scene in four seasons. I was fascinated and thought it must be an imaginary world (I lived in California). I was reading at a junior high level by then and school was easy to the point of deep boredom already. The girls played marbles, hopscotch, and chinese jump rope at recess.
I believe we may still have been playing Wild Stallions, can’t remember. It was a fine game in which one buttoned on the top button of one’s cardigan sweater (which every girl wore), flung the sweater over your back, and that was your mane. We galloped in a small band around the playground neighing and kicking boys in the shins.
Very little, specificly–and most of that I couldn’t be sure wasn’t menories from other primary school years. I can’t even remember the names of 3 out of 4 of my teachers from those years. (I’ve also forgotten the names of most of my middle and high school teachers–I’ve never had too great a retention for those sorts of things.)
I remember parts of second grade clearly- my first nephew was born in the fall of that year (my eldest sister is 18 years older than I am). So events around that- he was born while we were at the open house and my dad came running from home to tell my mom, me running up to tell my teacher, my mom greeting everyone at the door (as room mother) by saying “welcome, I’m a grandmother”. Later, my class making cards for my sister, and the big thank you card she made being read to the class.
I remember s a few other details from that year (including telling anyone who’d listen exactly how babies are made), but not my teacher’s name or face!
I spent grades 2 through 5 in the split classroom. There were too many kids my age for one class, so we were on kind of a weird bubble. The over flow classroom first had 2nd and 3rd, then 3rd and 4th, and then 4th and 5th. Mrs. Wagner taught me through all of these grades. My most prominent memory of 2nd grade was relief that I was not in the big 2nd grade class taught by Sister Mary Lorenza, whose reputation for savagery was legendary and verifiable.
Once a month I meet a group of my grade school classmates for drinks and dinner. We still talk about what a mean and sadistic woman Sister Mary Lorenza was.
Yes, I remember it. I had a broken arm and I got chickenpox while I had the cast on. They had this stupid idea that they’d put people into a class with the level they were spelling at and I had to go in with bigger kids. I hated it. They all stared at me and I was terrified having to go in there. I remember them giving me the word “crocus” to spell. What 7-year-old knows what a crocus is, let alone how to spell it? I’ve never forgotten the “crocus incident”. My teacher was Sister Laurent and she was plump. The teacher in my spelling class was Mother Joseph.
It’s always struck me as weird. My first grade teacher was Mrs. Eversole. I skipped 3rd grade. My 4th, 5th and 6th grade teachers were Hardy, Varner, and Barton. The principal was Mrs. Cunningham.
I’ve never been able to recall what my 2nd grade teacher’s name was. She was fresh out of college and it was the early 1970s, so she stood out as this flower child/hippie, long blonde hair, jeans and sandals when everyone else wore business attire, nice as could be. I have a vague impression we called her by her first name, so maybe that’s why it didn’t stick.
I have absolutely no memory of second grade (or first or kindergarten) although I do have a couple memories of that year: going trick or treating, discovering that comics were much better when you read the balloons, and the voting that took place for the 1944 presidential election. Later, my mother told me that I had loved the teacher and that her name was Miss Mismer. I do have some memories of the end of third grade from after we had moved in the early spring, principally, FDR’s death.
Hm… I remember teacher’s name. I think I remember about where my classroom was in the building. Mostly I remember the teacher reading is the Ramona books.
2nd Grade we moved and I went from Immaculate Conception school to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. There were about 24 kids in my class. My teacher was Mrs. Richards, who drove a '67 Mustang that I greatly admired. I was the smallest kid in the class and had the smallest desk they had in the school, and my dad built a box for my feet to rest on for penmanship class. Jean Yasbeck used to take me behind the bushes in front of the cafeteria and beat me up. I learned to stay in at recess and read. 3rd grade and I had to bring my 2nd grade desk with me because I was still too small for any of the desks. That was when I was put in the 8th grade reading and English classes. I could literally measure myself against fire hydrants on the way to school, and I was in with all these hulking 13 year old farm kids.
My 2nd grade teacher was one of my mother’s best friends and later became my aunt by marriage. I still see her at family events so there is no way to forget.
Second grade? Mrs. Morris and speed tests. 100 math problems in two minutes. I hated them and froze up until I developed my own method of added (involving writing dots for each number and counting them). It completely wrecked any ability to add in my head, though I’m finally beginning to learn it (I still used the dots regularly in high school calculus).
I think that was also the year I brought in my favorite book (Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X) to be used as a class lending library. We were supposed to get it back at the end of the year, but I never saw it again. It taught me to never let anyone borrow anything and expect to get it back.
I remember second grade fairly well. Just off the top of my head I remember my teacher and about ten student’s names. This was 1964-65, and my school was also overcrowded. Being close to an Army base, instead of having split sessions the Army loaned the use of a few vacant barracks buildings. They were originally built for WWI troops. I spent both second and third grade in these. We would walk or take the school bus to the regular school and then board another bus to go to our classrooms a few miles away. Each class(I think it was two classes for each grade) had it’s own stand-alone building with a big open room(formerly bunk area) for the classroom plus two bathrooms. I think the bathrooms were hastily partitioned for separate boys and girls rooms. There was a big kerosene furnace in the center of the room for heat. At recess we would play marbles in the gravel/dirt area surrounding us, or sometimes watch the army guys training or doing marching drills about a hundred yards away.
The teacher was Mrs. F., a mean woman who put me out in the hall as punishment for reading ahead in our Dick and Jane book (I got bored with the snail’s pace of the class).
I can still picture her - a large, forbidding Hereford-type person. :eek::smack:
Reagan ousting Carter, getting a day off b/c the US Embassy workers being held hostage in Iran were released, some kid gettiing chewed out for identifying as a non believer in response to an essay assignment about why we believed in god (it was a public school), and big assed blue pencils.
Yes–the walk to school, the school’s exterior, my teacher, that my teacher left late in the year to accompany her husband, a musician, on a professional trip to Russia, many of the books I read, math problems I worked on, the classroom, poetry we read and that I wrote, things I drew, several of my friends, the exterior and interior of the house my family lived in for only 1.5 years, the yard, the phone number and address, books I read at home (Little House, Aesop’s Fables, archaeology/anthropology texts left by a former owner), events in my family life, cats, neighbors, neighbors’ cats and dogs, cicadas, my mother’s artwork, my father’s office, television programs, a confrontation where older kids tried to steal my bike…
I’ve never forgotten the “crocus incident”. My teacher was Sister Laurent and she was plump. The teacher in my spelling class was Mother Joseph.