According to the Ocean Beach School District’s homepage, today marks the first day back to Long Beach School for second graders.  They will have the school to themselves today and tomorrow.  Wednesday they will be joined by 1st graders and on Thursday the Kindergarteners will begin “real” school.  By Friday the entire school will be up-and-running “as usual.”  Sort of.  Masks are required as is a daily “wellness certification” which probably means no temperature, no sore throat or sniffles.  And, coming soon will be return to school for Grades 3-12!

I can’t help but compare my own school experience to what the students of today are going through.  Pretty tame by contrast.  The only weird year I had was seventh grade.  My folks were going through “something” — I never did learn what.  Perhaps a trial separation?  In any case I was packed off to Burbank, CA to stay with my mother’s sister, Aunt Mona, and her husband.

School had already begun there and for reasons equally mysterious, I was sent to a Catholic School which was not anywhere nearby.  I remember riding the public transport “home” but don’t remember how I got to school in the morning.  Morning memories of that time are all about nylon stockings (with seams!) a garter belt, and a uniform which didn’t really fit well.  Ugh!

As a non-Catholic, I was not required to go to early morning mass, but joined my classmates in the school room a little later.  I remember that our teacher was a nun who we were to address as “Mother” and I was expected to learn how to say a rosary which was on loan to me.

By mid-November, I was in Oysterville with my mother, living with my Espy grandparents and enrolled at Ocean Park School.  I waited in front of the church across the street for the school bus every morning, usually with Johnny Holway.  I think Vernon Andrews was the only other kid from Oysterville in seventh grade, but several of the Wright boys, already in high school, rode the bus.  Shorty Wright, their dad, was the bus driver and they behaved pretty well when he was working but, occasionally, their older brother Gene was the  substitute driver and then… all bets were off.  More than once my pigtails were tied together or the dessert in my lunch disappeared.  Getting to school was an adventure, to be sure.

To top off that year, I was taken out of school for a month around Christmastime and Mom, Dad and I took the train across country to Boston to spend the holidays with my paternal grandparents.  It was a year of a great blizzard and my first “white Christmas” was spectacular, indeed!

“Nana” – Mary Woods Little

I guess none of the disruptions to my seventh grade year were too bothersome learning-wise.  When I enrolled in E Street Grammar School in the Fall of 1948, I was placed in “8-X” which was the “fast track” class and I continued with the same basic group of kids through graduation from San Rafael High School five years later.  I look back on that seventh grade year mostly with curiosity.  I don’t know why it was so disrupted, but it certainly wasn’t boring.

For the current generation, this has to be their strangest school year ever.  Ditto for parents, teachers, and all other school personnel.  I do hope it goes smoothly for everyone concerned.  For what it’s worth, I know that those of us not associated with schools right now are rooting for you for all we are worth!  Stay safe!  Stay well!  And make it an adventure to be looked back on with a sense of accomplishment, if nothing else!