Back in the old days (Not GOOD old days!) the education that Bill and I and most of our contemporaries encountered was far different from the way things are now.\u00a0 Or, as my mother, Evie, would have said, \u201cA white horse of a different color!)<\/p>\n
Honors classes?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Advanced placement classes?\u00a0 None of those either. The smart kids, the not so smart kids, and the really not smart kids all ended up stuck in the same classroom, doing the same work.\u00a0 Surprisingly enough, the smart kids usually finished their assignments early leaving them free to get into all kinds of mischief.\u00a0 Passing notes with a straightened out clothes hanger in the back of Miss Stammer\u2019s fifth grade classroom?\u00a0 Yup, Patsy McAdams and Judy Busk, guilty as charged.<\/p>\n
So the problem became what to do with those pesky smart kids while the ones, who really needed the help, were getting it.\u00a0 In order to keep from having to demote the bottom of the class, the teachers found a strategy to deal with the top part of the class\u2014remote those kids, as in send them elsewhere.<\/p>\n
For Bill, that meant being drafted to paint holiday windows around his grade school and to design and paint sets for school drama productions.\u00a0 During seventh and eighth grade, I spent very little time in actual classrooms.\u00a0 In seventh grade, I went from classroom to classroom every morning collecting the attendance sheets and taking them back to the principal\u2019s office.\u00a0 In eighth grade, though, I hit the big kahuna and got sent to the library!!<\/p>\n
There were books on the shelves in the library, but there was no librarian on staff.\u00a0 What they had was me.\u00a0 Teachers would accompany their pupils into the library where they would return their books and check out more.\u00a0 My job was to check \u2018em in and check \u2018em out, complete with check-out cards and a changeable date stamp for the due date record in the book.\u00a0 When the class left, I shelved the books.\u00a0 It was almost a part time job.\u00a0 Greenway school was K-8 at that point, with two classes per grade level.\u00a0 That was a lot of checking in and out.<\/p>\n
There was no such things as a card catalog.\u00a0 Books were shelved in alphabetical order, regular books on one side of the room; picture books on the other.\u00a0 Then there was the Billy Caldwell section.\u00a0 That one was also alphabetical, but it was mostly bare.\u00a0 Billy was a sickly kid who loved reading and who died when he was in sixth or seventh grade.\u00a0 In lieu of flowers, people were asked to donate to a fund to buy books for the library.\u00a0 With that money in hand, Mrs. Caldwell, without consulting any educators, went out and bought a whole bunch of books that kids actually LIKED!!\u00a0 What a concept!\u00a0 She filled those shelves with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Cherry Ames and the Bobbsey Twins.\u00a0 I never read them, but I\u2019m pretty sure there were also some Tom Swifts!<\/p>\n
Occasionally, someone would come along with a box of books to donate.\u00a0 What did I do?\u00a0 I put card pockets and date due slips in them and put them on the shelves.\u00a0 Some of them weren\u2019t exactly appropriate.\u00a0 The one I\u2019m thinking of right now, which I read cover, was entitled, \u201cHoneymoon for Seven.\u201d\u00a0 It was about two single parents getting together and blending families.<\/p>\n
Divorce was, to quote my mother again, \u201cscarce as hen\u2019s teeth\u201d in those days, so the book was pretty risqu\u00e9 reading for someone who was fourteen.\u00a0 I\u2019m pretty sure I read the book in the library rather than checking it out and taking back to the classroom or, worse, home where Evie would have seen it.\u00a0 As I was doing my steps this morning thinking about the blog, it occurred to me that maybe that book was the original source material for what would later become the Brady Bunch.\u00a0 But I digress.<\/p>\n
In 1985, when Bill and I married, he had three kids and I had two.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t take anyone along on the honeymoon, but even at the time, I remembered the title of that long ago book and realized that, without knowing it, I had been reading fiction and also glimpsing my future.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to last weekend\u2019s wedding in 2017.\u00a0 The groom, our son and a single dad, came to this second marriage with three adult daughters, a son-in-law, and a bun in the oven.\u00a0 The bride, Kathleen, has four sons, all but two of them mostly raised.\u00a0 The eldest has a longtime serious girlfriend.\u00a0 That\u2019s eleven people minimum.<\/p>\n
The lovely ceremony was conducted by my long time friend, Bishop Mary Ann Swenson who flew up from California to officiate.\u00a0 (Yes, there\u2019s a definite connection between my friend Bishop Swenson, and Joanna Brady\u2019s friend, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, but that\u2019s another story for another time.)<\/p>\n
The garden was lush and beautiful.\u00a0 Thanks to our caterers, Seasoned in Seattle, the food was great.\u00a0 It was warm, but not nearly as blazingly hot as it could have been or even as it\u2019s going to be later today.<\/p>\n
All in all, high marks all around.\u00a0 The day after the ceremony, everyone in the newly blended family trucked over to a spend a couple of days at a house in Ocean Shores.\u00a0 Bill\u2019s and Kathleen\u2019s honeymoon for twelve certainly tops our paltry honeymoon for seven.<\/p>\n
Next up?\u00a0 That\u2019s the grandkids\u2019 call.\u00a0 Let\u2019s see if they can top that!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
PS<\/p>\n
Here I am with egg all over my face.\u00a0 AFTER I published the blog entitled The Word of the Day is Novella, the marketing people in NY made the unilateral decision that there wouldn\u2019t BE a mass market edition of the novella, Still Dead after all.<\/p>\n
So for this one, my readers are stuck with either an e-book, the downloadable audio, or else waiting until Proof of Life comes out in paperback, way down the road.\u00a0 Sorry, sorry, sorry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the old days (Not GOOD old days!) the education that Bill and I and most of our contemporaries encountered was far different from the way things are now.\u00a0 Or, as my mother, Evie, would have said, \u201cA white horse of a different color!) Honors classes?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Advanced placement classes?\u00a0 None of those either. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-n2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1431,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/1431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}