SCHOOL FROM HELL

The New Bedford, Massachusetts School Board, in its infinite wisdom decided to change the beginning date for all school classes to January instead of either January or September as was the custom.

This meant that children who had birthdays in the Winter would get the opportunity to live through an extra six months in their current classes.  

So it was with me.  Instead of one year in 4th grade, I spent six months at the Cook School and one year at the Allen F. Wood School.

The Wood School was named for Mr. Wood who was principal at the Fifth Street Grammar School in the early 1900's.  This school was tasked with making little heathens into God-fearing men ready to fight the mighty leviathan in all of the global seas.

The Allen F. Wood School in 1943 was the same 1900 era Fifth Street School; but with a different name. I doubt that it had any maintenance fixes... ever.

My 4th grade class was on the top floor of this brick building.  To get there one had to carefully step over the holes where steps used to be. 

Once safely at the class, shaky metal frames connected to shaky wooden seats held shaky work pads and dribbly ink wells. 

Here and there were holes in the floor through which we could drip black ink down on the girls in the classes under us.

To control all this, there reigned a giant lady named Miss Savage.  I thought of her as a no-nonsense Nazi General in drag. 

Miss Savage had two jobs; principal and 4th grade teacher. She performed both duties with an iron hand, and she had rules that us miscreants had to obey.  Otherwise we would earn painful swats from a thick stick laying on her desk.

Girls were more or less exempt from her rules as long as their dresses were clean and they wore no makeup or jewelry.

Rule Number One

All boys must learn and speak proper English.

(My fellow students were of all sizes, shapes, colors and accents.  Most lived in homes where languages other than English was spoken.)

Rule Number Two

All boys must wear long-sleeved clean shirts.

(It's very hard to keep dirt and grime from seeking out the clothes of a nine-year old boy.)

Rule Number Three

All boys must wear neckties every day.

(A tough rule for many boys.  It meant that they had to shoplift ties from the town's Quarter Store.)

(I was lucky.  My cousin Winnie's uncle was an executive for a major distillery and wore each of his expensive ties only once.  When he heard of Rule Number Three, he began to send me his once-worn neckties.  I always wondered what Miss Savage thought of a poor kid wearing fashionable neckwear.)

Rule Number Four

Never question the principal's actions.  She knows a lot more than you do.

I tried to do so in the following situation, but I was unsuccessful.

Miss Savage administered the Stanford-Binet IQ tests given to 4th grade students at that time.  I found the test to be very easy, especially the vocabulary part.

Miss Savage called me into her office:

MS: You cheated on your test.

ME:  I did not.

MS: For example, a boy your age could not possibly get vocabulary words all right.

ME: ... ( I tried to tell her how I worked with my grandfather on his dream Crossword Puzzle Dictionary and could recognize all kinds of words and their meanings. She wouldn't listen.)

MS:  I'll adjust your IQ score so it properly reflects the truth.

So she figured out a way to record my IQ at a respectable but average 100.  This score governed my plans for future learning.  I did not think that I could make it in college. (I later learned that my IQ was quite higher than 100, and would qualify me for MENSA and INTERPOL)

Finally, I want to mention recess at the Wood School.  The so-called playground was a 16th of an acre stretch of sharp rocks, gravel and sand (mud when it rained, which was often.)

Our recess game was a version of Dodgeball.  A group of kids was elected to stand in the middle of a ring of other kids who threw rocks at them.  If a kid was hit, he joined the ring of sadistic fellow gamesters and got to do his own throwing until all but one was eliminated. He became the school hero.

Band-aids were available in the principal's office.

I couldn't wait to finish the 4th grade so I could then transfer to a more civilized school.

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