I just finished the first nine weeks of my last year of teaching. Last week I turned 65, and I plan to retire at the end of this school year. I'm sure I feel like everyone who ever retired. I am looking forward to it, and yet my job has been such a big part of my identity that I can't imagine how I will feel without it.
I think it might make it a little harder that I work in a school. School has been the setting for almost my entire life. I made a little chart this morning and realized that I have begun school, in one way or another, every fall since 1958.
I was 4 years old when I started school. No preschool then, but the cutoff date for kindergarten was November 1, so my October birthday meant that I could start school at 4 and that I would always be one of the youngest in my class. Kindergarten is actually one of the clearest memories I have of elementary school. I attended kindergarten at Pleasant Porter Elementary School with Mrs. Mary Gold as my teacher. I remember a large room with big, sunny windows, easels for our artwork, and centers where we could busily play kitchen or build with blocks. Much, much later, when I began work in the Sand Springs Schools, I met Jill, Mrs. Gold's granddaughter, who was to become one of my best friends.
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| My first school picture |
In the summer before my 5th grade year we moved to my great-grandmother's house on 38th St. just behind Park Elementary School. I attended 5th and 6th grade at Park--two of my favorite years with two of my favorite teachers, Mrs. Richardson and Miss Stewart. Funny what you remember from school; in the case of Mrs. Richardson I remember studying the explorers and admiring a beautiful hydrangea she had placed on her bookshelf. In the case of Miss Stewart it was mythology, The Secret Garden, and a Christmas tree made out of styrofoam balls and toothpicks. A lot of my memories involve the Park playground, too--riding bikes down the "big hill," climbing the jungle gyms, flying kites on the big field.
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| Off to school |
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| Tim and I with neighbors at Park playground |
Seventh, eighth, and ninth grade I spent at Clinton Junior High School, built on the site of the Clinton farmhouse, where my Castle family lived after moving to Red Fork in the 1910's. Having spent most of my teaching career in middle school, I have come to know that age group well. I recently observed to my colleagues that I remember hardly anything about what I learned in junior high--other than outlining, taught by Mrs. Kunsman, and some favorite pieces of literature, such as "Evangeline" and Ivanhoe, taught by Mrs. Cox in 9th grade--but I vividly remember what my friends and I wore and watched on TV and listened to on the radio. I know that we got a good academic background at Clinton, as our middle school students do now, but I also know that teenagers have other things on their minds besides school. I did start on a path in junior high school that would affect my later life; I became a library aide, and thought, even then, that being a librarian might be my future career.
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| Clinton |
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| School pic from junior high |
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| Mrs. Roberts and library aides at Clinton |
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| Senior picture |
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| Webster graduation 1971 |
Every year from 1958 to 1976 I attended school as a student; every fall since, for 42 years, I have started school as a teacher.
In the fall of 1977 I began my first year as an English and speech teacher at Mannford Middle School. When an opportunity arose to become the MMS librarian, I started library school at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, became certified as a librarian, and became a middle school librarian in the fall of 1982. Eventually, I received a Master in Liberal Studies from the University of Oklahoma. After 21 years at Mannford, I made a change of school district and age group, serving as a librarian at Pratt Elementary in Sand Springs for four years. Another opportunity arose, and I made the change back to junior high/middle school at Clyde Boyd in Sand Springs, where I have been for the last 17 years.
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| Various teacher school pics |
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| Even more school pics |
My grandmother's school life was both the same and different from mine. She began school in Kentucky in a one-room schoolhouse. One of her memories was that the school building had two back doors. If a boy went out to the privy, he put a book in one of the doors to signal to the other boys that the privy was occupied; a girl put hers in the other door. I know that she learned from a McGuffey's reader. Later I bought her a set of them when they were reprinted. The Castles moved to a farm between Davenport and Chandler, Oklahoma, in 1907, and my grandmother finished school there, graduating from Chandler High School.
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| Class picture from Kentucky, about 1902 |
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| Two back doors to the schoolhouse |
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| My grandmother with her re-issued McGuffey Reader |
In those days it only took a high school diploma to teach school, so my grandmother began her teaching career in a one-room school between Collinsville and Owasso, Oklahoma, in 1915. Her first years of teaching coincided with World War I, and I remember her saying that she spent much of her time breaking up fights between her German-American and Native American students. (I live in Owasso, not far from the corner of 116th E. Ave. and Garnett, which is still called German Corner. I often wonder how far I live from the site of my grandmother's first school.) Taking this job at Owasso was fateful. My grandmother boarded with Mrs. Walker at her boarding house in Collinsville, and this is how she met my grandfather, who lived there and co-owned the Candy Kitchen with his brother.
After three years at Owasso, my grandmother and grandfather married in June 1918, and my grandmother taught in the school year of 1918-1919 at Lynn Lane, a community east of Tulsa. (Lynn Lane is a road and community between Tulsa and Broken Arrow. I read online that a Tulsa Public Schools district school was built there in 1928 and closed in 1975. I wonder if it was on the same site as my grandmother's older school?)
My grandmother's family was firmly established at Red Fork by this time. My grandmother had taken the Civil Service exam, had been appointed postmaster of the Red Fork Post Office in 1917, and had turned over the running of the post office to her mother. So it was only natural that she would apply to teach at Red Fork School, which she did in the summer of 1919. She did this by walking out in a field to talk to the superintendent of the Red Fork Schools, O.C. Brooks. Mr. Brooks was impressed by her initiative--he said that not many applicants would walk out in a field to get a job--and my grandmother started teaching at Red Fork in the school year 1919-1920.
After teaching through the 1926-27 school year at Red Fork, and after having been married for ten years, my grandmother was pregnant with twins. The twins weren't born until January 1928, but she didn't begin the 1927-28 school year, 'cause you didn't teach in those days if you were "showing." After taking two years off with her boys, she came back to teaching in the 1929-30 school year at McBirney Elementary, where she taught for two years.
Another thing my grandmother and I have in common is that we both went back to school after we began teaching. At some time during the 20's or 30's--I'm not exactly sure when--my grandmother finally received her teaching degree after attending classes at both Northeastern in Tahlequah and the University of Tulsa. I have her Teacher's Certificate, presented in 1932, that granted her the ability to teach "in any grade from the first to the 8th, inclusive, in the public Schools of Oklahoma for the term of Life."
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| Life Teaching Certificate |
In the fall of 1931 my grandmother changed schools to Pleasant Porter Elementary, where she spent the rest of her teaching career, retiring in 1960 after 30 years at Porter--43 years in all. I can tell you exactly what inspired me to follow in her footsteps; any time we shopped in Red Fork we were sure to run into one of her former students who told me that she was the best teacher they ever had. I wanted someone to say that about me!
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| Article in TPS magazine about my grandmother's Land Run "special day" |
In November of 1956 my brother Tim was born, and in March of 1957 my mother died from complications of lupus. My dad moved us home to his parents' house, and from 1957 to 1960 they managed, with help from my retired Grandpa Smith and my maternal Granny Altstatt--to raise a toddler and a baby. I don't know what the rule for teacher's retirement or Social Security was in 1960, but I know it had something to do with my grandmother's birthday on March 1, because that was when she retired at age 63.
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| My grandmother on her last day at school |
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| And home teaching us |
She told me later that she wasn't really ready to retire because she loved teaching. The letter accepting her resignation from Superintendent of Schools, Charles Mason, says "I hope that this relief from school duties will give more time for your family and relieve you from the strain of several jobs." I have to say that this is one place where she and I differ--I am beginning to really look forward to retirement. The funny thing is, retirement for me may still involve school. While I won't be working in a school, I would love to take some non-credit courses at one of the local universities.
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| Retirement acknowledgement from Dr. Charles Mason, TPS Superintendent of Schools |
What I can't say is that I ever taught for the Tulsa Public Schools, but my brother can! I think my grandmother would be very proud of us.
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| My last school picture |
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