Here’s an interesting article that I ran across the other day. Some of my older readers may appreciate the list.
I miss the taste of paste (wintergreen) and the smell and feel and visual glory (and names) of Crayola brand crayons (which I actually collect to this day). I also miss clapping erasers together to remove most of the chalk dust, and then opening the port to the built-in vacuum system to let the negative pressure do the rest. I also miss blackboards and using white and colored chalk. (I’ve taught in classrooms with the “revised updated” green boards and those white boards that use foul, chemical-smelling markers that stain hands, sleeves and shirt fronts). Cursive writing, for me at least, was always easier than printing which we were never taught. While my results were never as good as Lucy Stansbury’s (class artist), they were passable and I learned to write quickly. I even learned some symbols to speed up taking notes such as “&” for “and” along with the use of arrows and balloon circles.
I also miss my special Scripto automatic pencil with its shorter round, see-through red or blue barrel and pink eraser. I will not miss the wall-mounted pencil sharpeners that I had to clean and that left my hands filthy with carbon black. But I will miss the sharp points that those wall mounters gave my lead pencils (#2 yellow Ticondaroga or Dixon), a point that hand-held sharpeners can’t duplicate. I do miss 16 mm. Bell and Howell movie projectors, less so the slide projector–even those with carousels– or the film strip projectors with their funny beeps. Cigar boxes, of course, were a luxury item for those of us who lived in non-smoking households. I had a deal with the local pharmacist who saved me some every now and then. Cigar boxes could be made to hold a variety of secret, amazing items, including de-coder rings, single edge razor blades for model airplane building, a skate key, a missing jigsaw puzzle piece, a chess piece, a folding scout knife with multiple blades, a match book, cloth “wolf-bear-lion” patches from my blue cub scout shirt, and a spare (oft-misplaced) needle valve that we used with a bicycle pump to inflate basketballs and footballs. You get the idea.
I wonder if enforced good manners have also disappeared? Coloring between the lines? Cutting construction paper to make Christmas Tree chains or Valentines–with a deplorably dull set of round pointed tin scissors? How about peanut butter sandwiched between the halves of a hamburger bun, warm milk in half pint cartons with a straw, fig newtons, brown bananas, or the surprising first taste of V-8?
I reserve a special place in my memory of elementary schools for the smell of mimeograph sheets or ditto sheets. The scent of that ink can still take my imagination through history–across the world, over the times tables, up and down animal kingdom, and in and out of Presidents and capitals. I knew so much, so easily, then. Uncomplicated process and no Software building and testing errors.
What will Millenials miss? Boomers?
Who could have predicted that one day, cursive handwriting would become a hot-button issue along the lines of school prayer and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance? But thanks to computers and texting and all that fancy technology, script handwriting is slowly going the way of the abacus. Many educators believe that legible printing and good typing skills are all today’s students need to learn to succeed in the world, and cursive is a non-essential skill. I recall feeling quite grown-up when I started learning cursive in the second grade — I could now read all that “secret” stuff my mom and other adults were writing down!
Maybe teachers were made of sturdier stuff Back in the Day, or maybe they just had a stock of Valium in the teacher’s lounge…how else did they survive without the “Classroom-Friendly Pencil Sharpeners” that are all the rage? Some are electric, some are manual, but they are quiet and many have a pop-out feature to prevent over-sharpening. Sure, these old-style sharpeners were awkward for southpaws to use, but to take away the fun of grinding a pencil down to a stub just for the heck of it? Sheesh.