Get Off My Lower Case!

It doesn’t seem possible, but the starting of the 2006-2007 school year marks 40 years since I entered first grade.

First grade was more of a milestone back then. Many of us had not attended kindergarten, and the idea of preschool and pre-preschool was alien to us. The obsession with ever earlier education/socialization was in its infancy. I wonder just how far the trend can go. (“I don’t care whether you let me play with your jump rope or not, Suzie Jane. I’ll just use my umbilical cord. Nyahh nyahh!”)

I did not give in easily to the academic experience. I worried that the regimentation would cramp my style. I still have my old notebook from the summer of 1966, in which I envisioned using a flying saucer loaded with anti-matter to annihilate the Hardison School building. Yes, it was my way of sticking it to The Man, as well as, um, igniting the atmosphere, and ending life as we know it.

Although I didn’t like having to learn the lower case alphabet (all my comic books and comic strips used all capitals!), and resisted having Mrs. Cummings look at my work over my shoulder (intellectual property rights, and all that), I adapted to school.

Somehow we survived without camera phones, calculators, PlayStations, iPods, and shoes that light up. We had one thing today’s kids don’t: determination, imagination, and respect. (Okay, and the “New Math.”)

We started school in a time when “Show And Tell” meant bringing your father’s Korean War canteen from home. Now it means the teacher invites, “Show me your prescription and I’ll tell you how many meds you get today.”

We started to school when a note asking, “Do you love me? Check yes or no” came on a sheet of Blue Horse tablet paper, not on official faculty stationery.

We were preoccupied enough with paddlings and dunce caps that we didn’t have time to worry that saying “Thank you God for our food” and “one nation under God” put us in violation of the Geneva Convention.

We weren’t health nuts by any means, but at least we were trim enough to play on the teeter-totter and not the slowly-sinks-into-the-ground-under-our-weight.

At least we could enjoy nap time without the pressures of today’s hectic world. The feds weren’t shaming us by enumerating how many algorithms a Japanese first grader was solving while we snoozed. You know, the oft-cited Japanese student who attends class 400 days a year and twice on the day of Grandma’s funeral.

Our primers were insipid (and lily-white), but at least they weren’t as preachy as today’s books. (“See Dick run. Run, Dick, run. See Dick test positive for steroids and lose his medal.”)

I can’t imagine my generation’s heroes making anti-Semitic statements at a traffic stop. Well, maybe Batman. (“Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed, Jews to the back of the bus.”)

I extend my best wishes to the Class of 2018. Looking over my own first grade group photo, I see those innocent, eager youngsters totally unaware of all the frustrations, failures, rivalries, and betrayals awaiting them.

If I could have forecast and prepared for even 10 percent of the crises ahead of us, well, I guess Donald Rumsfeld would have labeled me a show off . (“Thanks for the anti-matter idea, though. Hey, CNN building, get a load of this!”)