What Did You Learn In School Today?

Creative Works

What Did You Learn In School Today?

Non-Fiction - First Place Charles Braithwaite

Oceanside, California, USA

Listen to your child He really knows a lot,

He’ll tell you where he’s been Maybe show you what he’s got,

He’ll love and hate and cry And fill you deep with wonder,

So, ask him why and why Then listen for the thunder.

How many times did you come home from school and your mom or dad asked you, “What did you learn in school today?” You might answer, “We did multiplication,” or “We studied George Washington,” or “We read 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'”

My first school years were in Charleston, West Virginia. As a first-grader, I attended Fernbank Elementary School. I rode the city bus to school and my mom handed me a dime every morning to give to the bus driver. I can’t imagine sending a six-year-old off to school that way today. Was West Virginia somehow safer those many years ago?

I credit Fernbank Elementary for providing an education that transcended traditional “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.” It was January 1957, and when we returned to class from Christmas break our teacher instructed us to rearrange our desks into a new seating plan. Well, moving our desks around seemed kind of fun, and it was definitely better than studying English. But, there was one curious thing. It seemed that we had more desks than before. I counted forty-nine desks, but we only had forty students.

Then our teacher began making seat assignments. The desks were arranged in a block matrix of seven desks by seven desks. One by one all forty students were assigned to a new location. At the conclusion of the seating assignments, one thing became perfectly clear. There were nine empty desks in the center of the forty-nine desk matrix. Everybody looked at each other with that classic first grader “What the hell?” look. The teacher did not share the logic of this arrangement with us but proceeded to our regular school lessons.

All our questions were answered about an hour later. The classroom door opened and two uniformed policemen marched into our room. Behind them was an entourage that included the school principal, district superintendent, four men wearing wool suits, and one very nervous black first grade boy. He wore a white shirt, black pants, a brown sports jacket, and a bright red bow tie.

Our class sat in stunned silence, not so much because of the new student, but “Why the hell are the police here?”

And then the arrangement of the desks was finally explained. The two policemen escorted the new first grader to his desk. He was placed in the center of the block of nine desks so that he would not sit next to any white kid. There was a buffer of empty desks completely surrounding him.

The indignity did not end there. From his center point in the classroom, he was clearly visible to the teacher at all times. Many times, the teacher would ask a question of the class and wait for raised hands before picking a student. Never once in the entire semester did she call on him, even though he energetically waved his arm almost every time.

Our school was very old and had internal fire escape slides on the second floor. We had frequent fire drills and it was exciting to slide down the inner structure of the school and out to the playground. We were trained to line up in an orderly fashion according to our desk position and wait our turn to go down the chute. There was a new exception; our new student would always be last in line to escape. Grownups can be so evil.

I never noticed that people were white or black, until that day. That integration stunt at Fernbank School provided a lifelong lesson about racism, segregation, and integration. I don’t think the Board of Education intended for that lesson to be on the curriculum. But they really laid it out for forty-one students that day.

Over the years, I have re-visited that experience many times. As an adult, I’ve shared it with my parents, friends, and children. But what gnaws at me is this one question: “What was the effect of that