We lived on Berkeley Avenue in Bloomfield, New Jersey, five or six houses away from Fairview elementary school. Before I got to go to school myself, I watched the bigger kids walk by on their way to school, and couldn’t wait. On my first day of school, I was so excited that I woke up at four in the morning so I’d be ready.
Kindergarten classes were only half-days, with a morning class and an afternoon class. They put me in the morning class, and in the afternoon I played in my front yard. The first time the kids in the upper grades walked by and saw me playing, they chanted “Kindergarten baby, kindergarten baby!” That made me cry, but when I went inside, my mother talked me out of it.
I’m not positive on this, but I think the first thing they did was make us memorize our address in case we got lost. Somewhere along the way we learned to copy individual letters, then they bootstrapped on that by teaching us to print our names, first and last. One of the first things I did with that new knowledge was to write my name on the school steps, which earned me a session with a bucket and scrub brush. Can you imagine making today’s kids do that? You’d have a PTA riot. While I was scrubbing, my mother walked by but didn’t look over at me. I think she saw me but figured whatever I was doing I probably deserved it.
In first grade they taught us to read, or maybe they started in kindergarten. This is kind of a chicken/egg question, but do they teach you to read and write at the same time? I have absolutely zero memory of anything that happened in first or second grade, I don’t know why. But I did learn to read and write.
An interesting angle here – in high school two towns over, in freshman English we had an exercise where we each got a stack of index cards of author names, and the idea was to put them in alphabetical order. When we started, I suddenly realized I don’t know the alphabet, not in sequence, and had to fake my way through. Does ‘R’ come before ‘P’, or is it the other way around? What are the letters in between? We were never taught the alphabet song in Fairview, would that have been enough?
That night I went straight to my room after dinner and taught myself the alphabet in A-to-Z sequence, although I’m still slow at it and sometimes have to get sort of a running start from ‘A’ to get the letter-to-letter relationships right. I don’t know who to blame for this.