Not long ago, I heard from one of my third grade classmates, Rick T. He'd been surfing around the World Wide Web, and must have been doing some Kellogg searching and he found this blog and he emailed me and we've had some solid exchanges since.
Rick started dipping into my blog entries and told me he's enjoyed reading what he's looked at and he wondered if I had shut down my blog or gone on a hiatus since I had no posts since Christmas.
Well, the day after Christmas, I jumped in my car and drove to Kellogg and didn't bring my computer. I was off the grid until I returned to Eugene about January 8th.
It actually felt good to be away from blogging and email and Facebook for those two weeks or so and when I was back in my Eugene home with wireless internet service again, I continued my break as much as I could and took a break from blogging.
Back in January, I decided I could retire from teaching at Lane Community College and I began to think quite a bit about why I liked this prospect of retirement.
It wasn't about the money. My pension will be very modest.
But I think it will, in some ways, be about privacy, about having a less public life. As a teacher, I am paid to make my thoughts public, not keep them to myself. I read poems and novels and plays and essays and memoirs and view movies so that my courses will have substance, and I must make my insights public.
For years, I have loved this. But after thirty-five years of teaching and studying, I'm ready to pull back, to read and think and not make my insights public, to think, not so I can teach classes, but just to think and enjoy the workings of my mind. I'm ready to have my mind work on its own and not have its workings be in service to institutional learning.
In this same spirit of private vrs. public thinking, I've also been thinking about the writing I've done for this blog. I decided in January to pull back and keep many of my thoughts to myself.
But, then Rick T. wrote to me and I thought about our third grade year together at Sunnyside Elementary and how our school is now owned by Dave Smith Motors and the playground is filled with Dodges and Chryslers and Jeeps, but even more I thought about how at recess Rick and Scott and I barreled out of class and down the hall to leave the building for the playground and we let out this holler: Uh YOUWEEE! I have no idea who came up with it, but Scott and Rick and I gave that holler a full-lunged holler day after day, recess after recess.
One day, however, Mrs. Hitzel, our teacher, wrote on the board that we had to do something about ending this, what she called, "horrible holler".
We cooperated. Uh YOUWEEE! ended, at least in the hallway and on the playground.
I hadn't thought about the horrible holler for quite a while and Rick's email triggered that memory, as well as the day Rick came over to our house and made my dad nearly jump out of his skin when we ran though the house firing cap guns while he was watching Maverick or some other late afternoon rerun while enjoying a beer after work.
And so I decided to break the hiatus, to think more about Rick and the third grade and make it public.
Showing posts with label Dave Smith Motors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dave Smith Motors. Show all posts
Monday, April 9, 2012
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Kellogg Tour: Early Learning, Photos Taken 12/30/2006 (Part 2)
In the third grade, I trasferred from Silver King elementary (another post) to Sunnyside elementary school:
Sunnyside school was closed not too long ago and its facilities were taken over by:
Dave Smith Motors in Kellogg is the largest Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep dealer in the world for the third year running. Dave Smith Motors dominates Kellogg. Cars and trucks are everywhere. So, when I go back to my old school, here's what the playground that was for the first and second graders and for part of noon recess for third graders looks like:
The big kids' playground was a lot better. It had a large playground with room for touch football games and a batting cage from which we played a lot of baseball. My favorite day at Sunnyside school was in the fifth grade during a cold snap. The teachers wouldn't come out for playground duty. The temperature was below zero. The snow was less than a foot deep, deep enough to cushion us by shallow enough to run in it. It was dry snow. We played forbidden tackle football that noon hour. Our running and tackling kept us warm. We weren't sopping wet when we returned to class. I loved that day. Were we to try to play that football game today, here's what we'd face:
And this:
Dave Smith Motors calls attention to itself with the bright colored license plate insert I showed earlier and with Macy Day Parade styled helium balloons that all look pretty similar. Sunnyside Elementary was a place where I learned arithmetic, writing, to read good books, and where I had a generally very good academic experience. Now, hovering over the building that once housed my old school is this:
At Sunnyside Elementary, we compensated for not having an outside basket for playing basketball by shooting through the space created under the fire escape by the brace on the right helping hold up the fire escape:
It was at this spot that David Rowley, a sixth grader, came to me and told me John F. Kennedy had been shot. I thought of that moment even more deeply today because Dave Smith Motors was flying its flags at half mast in remembrance of the passing of President Gerald Ford:
Sunnyside school was closed not too long ago and its facilities were taken over by:
Dave Smith Motors in Kellogg is the largest Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep dealer in the world for the third year running. Dave Smith Motors dominates Kellogg. Cars and trucks are everywhere. So, when I go back to my old school, here's what the playground that was for the first and second graders and for part of noon recess for third graders looks like:
The big kids' playground was a lot better. It had a large playground with room for touch football games and a batting cage from which we played a lot of baseball. My favorite day at Sunnyside school was in the fifth grade during a cold snap. The teachers wouldn't come out for playground duty. The temperature was below zero. The snow was less than a foot deep, deep enough to cushion us by shallow enough to run in it. It was dry snow. We played forbidden tackle football that noon hour. Our running and tackling kept us warm. We weren't sopping wet when we returned to class. I loved that day. Were we to try to play that football game today, here's what we'd face:
And this:
Dave Smith Motors calls attention to itself with the bright colored license plate insert I showed earlier and with Macy Day Parade styled helium balloons that all look pretty similar. Sunnyside Elementary was a place where I learned arithmetic, writing, to read good books, and where I had a generally very good academic experience. Now, hovering over the building that once housed my old school is this:
At Sunnyside Elementary, we compensated for not having an outside basket for playing basketball by shooting through the space created under the fire escape by the brace on the right helping hold up the fire escape:
It was at this spot that David Rowley, a sixth grader, came to me and told me John F. Kennedy had been shot. I thought of that moment even more deeply today because Dave Smith Motors was flying its flags at half mast in remembrance of the passing of President Gerald Ford:
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