The Washington Spectator/ The Way They Were
King, Florence
My Life in the D.C. Public Schools, 1941-1953 The Way They Were by Florence King / always follow the news about District of Columbia public schools, and lately it seems to be following...
...To demonstrate stylistic points it eschewed banal Dick-and-Jane quotidiana in favor of sentences from great literature...
...Shaped by the Upper South of horses, tobacco, and Episcopalians instead of the Deep South of mules, cotFlorence King's latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...Martin's...
...on the first day, she wrote a passage on the board and made us copy it, then announced that from then on we would be marked down if we reverted to printing...
...she had forgotten more than Vlad the Impaler ever knew...
...When the teacher saw it and learned that my father had also taught me to read, she wrote a note and pinned it on my dress...
...Intrigued by the atmospheric sentences about a place called "Egdon Heath," I discovered Thomas Hardy and devoured five of his novels on my own...
...Our grading system consisted of OP for outstanding progress, SP for satisfactory progress, and NI for needs improvement, my usual math grade...
...It was too far to walk so I took the streetcar, using D.C...
...Speakers at crime symposia also call it the 14th Street Corridor...
...Most D.C...
...Once we got the hang of it she appointed an ink monitor to fill our inkwells and passed out steel-nib pens along with a warning that henceforth we would be marked down if we turned in work in pencil...
...Third year (tenth grade) was advanced gramtnar—passé simple, passé anterieur, and all four tenses of the subjunctive—plus readings from Alphonse Daudet and Anatole France...
...I graduated from Roosevelt in 1953...
...We could print through first grade but thereafter had to write in script...
...Still, the teacher showed no concern for anyone's self-esteem except mine, and she made the decision on her own without benefit of bureaucratic pow-wows and endless paperwork...
...Titanic on the bow and signed my name the way my father had taught me with his follow-thedots exercises...
...elementary schools had dentists...
...Raymond had its share of progressive teachers who worried about social adjustment and peer problems, but they were usually overruled by Miss Ballinger, who let it be known that she favored traditionalists like herself...
...I got back in her good graces when I won the weekly spelling bees for the rest of the semester...
...There was no way I could unpin it and read it without getting caught...
...I've often wondered if she 60 The American Spectator July 1995 had been installed as part of a New Deal showcase, something dreamed up by Eleanor Roosevelt in hopes of starting a nationwide trend, because her services were free...
...The cafeteria offered a hamburger and slaw for 35 cents...
...We were sent en masse to Central High, where Powell graduates normally went, which was renamed Central Junior-Senior High...
...Those who didn't pay didn't get it...
...Fourth year was devoted to Cyrano...
...My mother walked with me through first grade but after that I was on my own, sent off with the standard Washington warning, "Watch out for cars with diplomatic tags, they'll squish you flat and the police can't touch them...
...Then came the news that Central was being turned over to the Negro school system to replace their overcrowded Cardozo High...
...We had such a strong Tory instinct for disfranchisement that we even applied it to ourselves...
...T he principal was Miss Lou Ballinger, a satrap in pince-nez with the posture of Queen Mary...
...I was enrolled in "low" kindergarten, the shorter afternoon session that was designed to give five-year-olds a semester to get used to the rigors of sitting still and concentrating before advancing to "high" kindergarten...
...I don't remember taking the SAT or any other college-entrance exams...
...There was only one male teacher, a dearth that prevailed throughout my public school days...
...Transit's student tickets, a bargain at three cents a ride...
...we thought they were for hicks...
...Mary Girard's French classes...
...In 5B I made the mistake of quoting my grandmother's dictum, "A lady never adds fractions if they have different bottoms," but my teacher, a non-Southerner, disagreed: she kept me after school and made me add every set in the book...
...My second-grade teacher used the cold-turkey method...
...Limousine liberals call it "east of the park," by which they mean Rock Creek Park as well as a lot of other things...
...Raymond was three blocks fromhome...
...Naturally we had to read the universally despised Silas Marner, whose disappearance from today's high-school curricula gives dumbing-down a good name, but our English comp text inadvertently provided an antidote...
...Or maybe I was excused from SATs because I won a scholarship...
...natives at that time had strong Virginia or Maryland roots...
...Elva C. Wells: imagine a six-foot Margaret Thatcher and you've got her...
...in ninth grade, David Copperfield (abridged), "Quality" by John Galsworthy, "The Lady—Or the Tiger...
...In English we read The Odyssey, "Thanatopsis," and stories by Twain and Poe...
...Four is smartest, three is next-to-smartest, two is average, and one is dumb...
...Her one-chair shop was a proving ground of sexual equality...
...The only other disciplinary offense happened in biology...
...The teacher asked, "What do we call the new bud on the beech tree...
...depicting an iceberg on white paper stumped me until I remembered they were said to look blue...
...The women teachers achieved complete psychological control over the most obstreperous boys, especially Miss Scott, who taught U.S...
...N ear the end of the sixth grade we were given an IQ test without being told why, but everyone knew...
...J. Edgar Hoover was one of many influential Central graduates who fought the switch, to no avail...
...In any case, my next stop was American University at Massachusetts and Nebraska Avenues, N.W.—going to school in D.C...
...There was no cafeteria, just a lunch room where we unpacked our brown bags or, if we had them, lunchboxes and thermoses...
...One girl did have sex and got pregnant...
...I don't remember anyone going without, but if any child was paid for by the school it was kept quiet, and my mother never received any instructions about how to apply for free milk...
...The "old boy network" that feminists bewail in today's schools was non-existent, and to top it all off, Raymond even had its own resident female dentist...
...This was my only year at Powell...
...She heard it and sent him to the principal...
...Please bring her to high kindergarten tomorrow at nine...
...Theodore Roosevelt High School at 13th and Upshur, N.W...
...The teacher seated us at long worktables, passed out drawing paper and crayons, and told us to draw a picture of anything we liked...
...by Frank Stanton, and Julius Caesar...
...had become a habit...
...has been "adopted" by Janet Reno, who visits it once a month...
...One of the assistant principals was a man but he was needed mainly for invading the boys' bathrooms to catch smokers...
...My parents detonated when I said I wanted to go to her, but I finally prevailed, using the same argument all the other deluded kids used: "It won't hurt because she's a woman...
...Politicians call it Ward Four...
...and in fifth year, a class containing only eight girls, we did comparison readings of Racine's Berenice and Corneille's Tite et Berenice, translating the major speeches into heroic couplets to approximate the alexandrines...
...the moment she started to show she was expelled and we all sniffed and said "See...
...I had to wait for my mother to come and pick me up to find out that it said: "Florence is too advanced for low kindergarten...
...We didn't call it anything, least of all Ward Four, because Washingtonians could not vote, a fact that distressed no one I knew and in which we all took a perverse pride...
...There's 7A1, 7A2, 7A3, and 7A4...
...In the fall of 1950 I entered tenth grade at Roosevelt High...
...history and was nicknamed "Dred...
...0 The American Spectator July 1995 61...
...Public Schools, 1941-1953 The Way They Were by Florence King / always follow the news about District of Columbia public schools, and lately it seems to be following me: • Raymond Elementary at 10th and Spring Road, N.W...
...For fifty cents a week we got a daily mid-morning snack of a half-pint of milk and two graham crackers...
...I drew an ocean liner and colored it in...
...in 1948 the building was turned over to the Negro school system and became Bell Vocational...
...In 2B she picked out five of us she thought could skip 3A, informed Miss Ballinger, and it was done...
...In eighth grade now, I started French (Track .3 took French, Track 4 took Latin...
...None of us had ever seen a yellow school bus except in pictures...
...There were no male teachers except for the coaches...
...Last year Cardozo High School at 11th and Clifton, N.W...
...I entered 7A3 at Powell Junior High, located on Hyatt Place just above 14th Street, in 1947...
...M y Roosevelt years were the happiest of my life thanks to Mrs...
...Bell Multicultural High School, located on Hyatt Place just above 14th and Park Road, N.W., has become too multicultural for its black students and their parents, who are seething over the large number of courses taught in Spanish...
...This was only slightly less than the same meal cost at the drugstore lunch counters on nearby Georgia Avenue, but we were not allowed to leave the building: going out for lunch was almost as unthinkable as having sex...
...I could have gone directly into first grade, but showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about their jobs...
...Either they did not yet exist, or else D.C.'s rigid tracking system told the colleges all they needed to know...
...In other courses we used textbooks now considered college level, e.g., Carl Becker's Modern History...
...In seventh-grade English we read "The Man Without a Country," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Tom Sawyer, and "Evangeline...
...ton, and Baptists, democratic populism was not our long suit...
...When I finished, I printed R.M.S...
...All of these schools are in a section now known as Columbia Heights, a name that did not exist when I was growing up there...
...as an only child I brown-bagged it after my "Remember Pearl Harbor" cardboard lunchbox fell apart...
...entered Raymond Elementary in September 1941...
...no exceptions...
...I picked the Titanic because my father had told me about it...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...The only big street to cross was Spring Road in front of the school, but we had patrol boys (no girls) in white crossbelts stationed on the corners, all wishing a diplomat's car would come by so they could order it to stop—we native Washingtonians wrote the book on government-hating...
...They have to find out who's smart and who's dumb so they can track us for junior high," said a classmate...
...I don't know how it came to pass, or whether other D.C...
...Roosevelt's principal was Mrs...
...last year saw a hallway gun fight in which a security guard was shot by a student...
...and a boy in back whispered, "son of a beech...
...was the scene of the first fatal shooting of a student in a District school...
...After the war started and metal was scarce, only kids who inherited these items from older siblings had them...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
