She Wouldn't Take 'No' For An Answer

My mother experienced her school days differently from my father. She grew up in a small town southwest of Asheville, North Carolina, and went to school with the same friends and family all the way through high school. Unlike my father, she had the opportunity to complete two years of college, thanks to her oldest brother who sent her an allotment from his Navy pay during World War II. To the best of my knowledge, she's the only one of the eleven children in her family who attended college.

I want to share one of my favorite stories about her earliest school years.

My grandfather served as both principal and classroom teacher at Maple Springs School, the very small country school his children attended. He and they could easily walk to school every morning, traversing the "Little Red Hill" behind their house. My mother was the fifth child in the family, and had watched her older siblings go off to school every day with her daddy. She turned five in March. When school began in late August, her sister Edith, who was six, prepared to join the older children and march to school that day. This was too much for my mother. She and Edith were very close, and if Edith could go to school, mother felt sure she could go, too. She put on her nice dress and went out the door with the rest of the bunch. My grandfather stopped her and told her she wasn't old enough. Apparently mother 'pitched a fit', as we say. Determined to go, she fussed and cried and carried on so dramatically that, in order to get everyone else to school on time, my grandfather relented and let her come along. If a five-year-old could look smugly satisfied, I think my mother did. Off she went with Edith and the rest. (I imagine my grandmother sighed with relief!)

Apparently, my mother was a good judge of when she should start school. She picked up the first grade work easily and followed along with the class from that day onward. As she sat in the classroom, she noticed the alphabet posted on a type of cardboard frieze around the upper edges of the walls. She learned those letters very thoroughly in order, and then, remarkably, she learned them backwards, too. My sister and brother and I heard her many, many times just zip right through the alphabet from Z to A. Might she have had a little extra time on her hands during that first year?

Mother went on to become a teacher herself, first in a one-room school back in Nantahala, North Carolina and then as a kindergarten teacher in Portsmouth for 35 years.  I've always wondered if her experiences as a precocious five-year-old influenced her remarkable ability to teach and lead four- and five-year-olds in her kindergarten classes. She taught and formed my own children, her first grandchildren, and I am channeling her with my own grandchildren. Her determination and support provided us with college and graduate school. But I never learned the alphabet backwards.