Classrooms Were Packed With Learning

We were overcrowded and didn’t even know it.

Yes, the same way that many of us were poor - during that same era, the Depression - and didn’t know it.

No parents in our neighborhood hiked up to public school, or to the parochial school I attended, to protest overcrowded classrooms.

For one thing, they probably had no hint as to the ideal number of students in one class.

Now, rare is the day when our newspaper doesn’t publish a story about overflowing schools.

And why not? Parents and educational leaders weep and gnash their choppers and pull their hair over the problem.

We didn’t engage in any of that. OK, our school did have the sporadic flare-up of hair-pulling, although it had nothing to do with space or the pursuit of academic happiness.

Confine 200 girls to the same building and you’re bound to have some hair-pulling, right, guys? One assumes that this is why recesses were invented.

In retrospect, my guess is that we had about 50 desks per classroom, kindergarten through eighth, and every one was taken.

In some rooms, to create space, the two middle rows of desks were jammed together, and yet never did we students feel squeezed in or underprivileged.

The closeness, really, was an advantage - except on stifling hot days - if you could sit next to a pal, or for those boys who couldn’t keep roving eyes off a companion’s test paper.

In those days it was unchallenged dogma that girls never cheated.

Maybe our books weren’t always new but unfailingly there were enough to go around.

Some of those hand-me-down history and geography books turned up with priceless penciled annotations in the margins, hilarious commentaries scrawled by the students who’d used the volumes the year before.

Take note, the textbook graffiti was never, never nasty.

We didn’t feel deprived by not having a cafeteria.

We went home for lunch, except in blizzard conditions, and then brought our newspaper-wrapped jelly sandwiches and apples to school in the morning and ate at our desks.

Only once did I see a student arrive at school in an auto.

We studied biblical and regular history, geography, learned how to read and write and spell and to manufacture spitballs, and we felt the teacher’s ruler across our knuckles.

We survived, and some of us amounted to something.